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BV 4211 .B437 1890~
Behrends, A. J. f 18?q-
1900.

The philosophy of preaching

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING

THE

Philosophy of Preaching

BY

A. J. F, BEHRENDS, D.D.

Pastor of the Central Congregational Church,
Bkooklyn, N.Y.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

COPYRIGHT, 1890,
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

TO MY WIFE

PREFATORY NOTE.

This little volume contains the lectures
given in the month of February of the pres-
ent year, before the Divinity School of Yale
University, on the Lyman Beecher founda-
tion. It is not a treatise on homiletics. The
questions connected with the preparation and
the delivery of sermons have been intention-
ally passed by. The aim has been to deal
with the more fundamental inquiry of the
end of all preaching, and to emphasize the
universal elements of all effective religious
address. There has been no citation of
authorities, for the simple reason that none
were consulted and used. The vicAvs here
presented had slowly taken form during a
ministry of twenty-five years, and they have
at least the merit of profound personal con-
viction, which the author has been encour-

vii

viii PREFATORY XOTE.

aged, by friends in whose critical judgment
he has great confidence, to believe may be
of service to a wider circle than the one to
which they were first given. The form of
direct address has been preserved, as a change
of literary dress would have involved a rad-
ical reconstruction of the material, with the
danger of an enlargement in bulk, which
might have proved unwelcome to the reader.
For in an age when many books are written,
brevity is a quality which every busy student
appreciates. A T F B

Brooklyn, N.Y., March, 1890.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

The Philosophy of Preaching. 1 1

The Philosophy of Preaching. II 24

The Personal Element in Preaching ... 57

The Ethical Element in Preaching ... 78

The Biblical Element in Preaching . . . 104

The Spiritual Element in Preaching. I. . 130

The Spiritual Element in Preaching. II. . 166

The Practical Element in Preaching . . 196

1
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PEEACHING.

I.

No man can achieve solid and satisfactory
success in any calling, who is not convinced
that the services which he renders are of
substantial benefit to the public, and that
what he gives is a full ecj^uivalent for what
he receives. He who suspects that he is
merely tolerated, or that he occupies the
place of a dependent, or who discovers that
he is retained when he has ceased to suj^ply
a living demand, inevitably suffers in the
consciousness of manly independence ; and
where manhood shrivels, work loses its dig-
nity and power. I have always admired
the spirit of the man, who is said to have
applied for employment to a wealthy and
charitable merchant. The poor fellow Avas
told to remove a huge pile of stones from
one end of a field to another. When this
task was completed he was ordered to re-
place them in their original position. This

1

2 PIIILOSOrilY OF PREACHING.

he did somewhat reluctantly, but when his
employer sent word to have the operation
repeated a second time and as often as the
emploj'ee chose, the latter promptly and
fii-ml}' rebelled. He did not care to \msy
himself at a useless task. It made him feel
like a beffofar, and this conscious deo-rada-
tion was to him a greater evil than hunger.
And he was right. There is dignity in
labor only when it is directed to useful
ends, and the vigor mth which a true man
will prosecute and push his chosen work
Mill depend upon his conviction of its ne-
cessit}' to the welfare of the world. The
final cause of labor is an ethical and extra-
pereonal one. The immediate stimulus is
supplied by the physical needs of the indi-
vidual, and by the requirements of the
liousehold, but amid the multitudinous in-
dustries of modern civilization the stagna-
tion and degfradation of character can be
prevented, and the noblest manhood can
come to maturity only through the eonvic-
tion that tin.' liunil)lest toiler is a pul)lic
benefactor.

To this w hoh'soiiii' law tlu' pulpit is no
exee[)tioii. It is idh' to i-laim for it tlie
august dignity of a Divine institution; tor

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 3

sucli a claim can be substantiated only by
the eternal necessity, and the essential ra-
tionality, of its sphere. It is not enough
for some men to insist, with Avhatever
honesty and emphasis, that God has called
them to preach ; unless their message com-
pels an audience, and produces conviction
of its Divine origin and intrinsic worth, the
world will look upon its prophets as mis-
guided enthusiasts. The counsels of God
are always the embodiment of infinite power,
wisdom, holiness, and love. They are woven
into the essential and eternal needs of hu-
man nature, and of human history. No
commission can be supposed to bear the
Divine seal, which does not convey a mes-
sage which every man needs to hear, and
which cannot grow obsolete with any con-
ceivable advance in civilization. Is preach-
ing such an agency, instituted for definite
and lofty ends, incapable of being eliminated
or supplanted while history runs its course ?
That question confronts us at the very be-
ginning of our work, and every man should
settle that debate in his own mind before
he takes upon himself the holy vows of
Christian ordination.

Paul exhorted Timothy to suffer no man

4 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

to despise him. to iiiaintaiu liis self-respect
l)y making full proof of his ministry, even
as he Avas not asluimed of the Gospel of
Cln-ist, among angry Jews and mocking
Greeks, because he knew it to he the power
of God unto salvation for all that l^elieved.
The advice has not become obsolete. It
was never needed more than now. There
is no place where decay and loss of power
so surely and swiftly follow upon moral
timidity, or that want of intellectual poise
which a noble self-respect insures, as the
pulpit. The preacher, as the herald of
God, should be the humblest of men; but
that humility sho\dd inspire him with an
unusual and sustained boldness Avhen he
speaks to his fellows, under the profound
conviction that what he has to say the
w^hole world, from prince to beggar, needs
to hear and heed.

All this may seem to you commonplace,
requiring no argument. For yeare your
stufbes and associations have been such as
to impress upon you the necessity aufT tlie
dignity of the preacher's vocation. But
you will soon leave these quiet retreats of
Christian learning, and you will be sum-
moned to wrestle with a prosaic world.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 5

There are some things which no theologi-
cal seminary can teach you. There is no
preparation Avhich can save you from the
wrench which every man must endure
when the call for adjustment to his practi-
cal environment presses upon him. Some
men never heed that call, and they either
drift out of the ministry, or they console
themselves with the doctrine of total de-
pravity, bewailing the degeneracy of hu-
man nature which prevents any man from
having more than a handful of hearers
unless he be either a heretic or a mounte-
bank. You must have faith in your mes-
sage, and you must have faith in men ; and
if your message fails to command attention,
the most sensible thing is to conclude that
you have been lacking in practical skill.
Never suffer the suspicion to shadow you
that the message is not adapted to the
hearer, nor that the Christian preacher is
gradually becoming crowded out of his
place.

That suspicion pervades the air of mod-
ern life. There are men who will treat
you with haughty indifference, or ^vith
condescending civility, simply because you
are a clergyman. They do not believe in

6 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

tliL' imuiliiK'ss of your voration. They will
rarely come to hear you preach. They
may take a pei"sonal liking to 30U, and
they may avail themselves of yoiu- services
at funerals and weddings, but they would
think more of you if you were a hod-car-
rier or a brickla3'er. They will say it is a
pity that you became a priest, seeing there
is so much manly stuff in you. A senti-
ment like that cannot be argued down.
You must live it down, and you can live it
down only a,s the conviction in you is at
white lieat that your work is tlie manliest
under the sun, seeking the highest jjracti-
cal ends and securing the most stable re-
sults. That will give tone and nerve to
your speech. That will make you impa-
tient of all rhetorical redundancies and
pyrotechnics. That will give pungency
and j)owcr to your style. The ingrained
consciousness that your work is manly,
\\\\\ make your pulpit a throne of manli-
ness, of strong and sturdy utterance, and
they who once sneered will come to listen
with respect, and will not go away without
profit. But even if they do not come, you
cannot afford to enter upon your work un-
less you have failli in its essential manli-
ness, and in its eternal worth.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 7

Nor is it simply the non-Christian ele-
ment of society which discounts the value
of preaching. The sermon has become the
butt of universal ridicule. Even ministers
speak slightingly of it. You will be re-
minded that if you pray more than five
minutes you are insufferably tedious, and
that a sermon of half an hour is as much as
the average audience will endui"e. In many
churches the sermon has been crowded out
by the service, and has come to be regarded
as an appendage. In the Roman ritual it
is altogether overshadowed. The printing
press is supposed to have made the pulpit
superfluous, or at least to have seriously
narrowed the scope of its influence ; and
there are not a few earnest Christian men
who raise the question Avhether some read-
justment is not called for, whether the
preacher should not gracefully retire before
he is forced to withdraw, and is left behind
like a shattered hulk by the retiring tide.
May it not be that the preacher was in-
dispensable while there were no movable
types, and that with the invention of print-
ing, and the diffusion of intelligence, his
importance has ceased? The inquiry is
not a very logical one, in the face of the

8 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

fact that (luring the Middle Ages, when
there were no i)rinting presses, there was
veiy little preaching, and that since the
days of Gutenberg there has never been so
much as now. The printed page has not
made speech obsolete. We do not read let-
ters to each other in the household, and we
cb'op the pen and the telegraph in favor of
a pei-sonal interview, when we are deter-
mined to secure our end. I have known
men to cross the continent to procure in-
formation promptly and at first hand. The
pen may be mightier than the sword, but
it is not mightier than the tongue. Things
are talked about before they are written
about, and all great movements, such as
the Reformation, the revival under the
Wesleys, the anti-slavery campaign, and
the temperance reform, depend, for their
inauguration and success, upon the proph-
ets of fieiy speech. There never has been
an important political campaign when the
stump (lid not take ])recedence of the tri-
pod. The truth is that tlie jjower of s])eech
is man's supreme physical endowment, as
the power of thought makes him the
crowned and sceptred monarch of the
universe.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 9

The printed page is only an enlarge-
ment in the sphere of the written manu-
script; and if the manuscript cannot
supersede the spoken word, there is no
reason to suppose that any cheapening
process of multiplying copies can do it.
There are things which the types cannot
reproduce. The recorded sermons of White-
field do not glow with the fire of his won-
derful oratory. The discourses of Jonathan
Edwards fail to disclose the secret of his
quiet and resistless power. The speeches
of the greatest orators are read without
emotion, when the audiences that heard
them were swept and swayed as by a
whirlwind. The face of Cicero gave power
to his words. The concentrated energy of
Demosthenes carried conviction with his
argument. The kindling eye, the play of
emotion on the mobile countenance, the
curling of the lips, the pointed finger or
sudden thrust of the hand, the erect and
quivering frame, the blood mounting to the
temples, the momentary pause, the rush of
rapid, eager speech, all that belongs to an
intense and vital personality, grappling
with great thoughts, moved by strong pas-
sions, urged forward to high endeavor,

10 nilLOSOPIIY OF PREACHING.

cannot l)e tiansfeiTed to plates of metal
and traced upon paper. If sublimit}' con-
sists in the employment of the simplest
asrents for the attainment of the loftiest
ends, then there is nothing sublimer than
hinging the triumph of righteousness in
the earth ui)on the energy of Iniman S2)eech.
The Greeks laughed at tlic dream. In
their judgment it was concentrated folly.
They might have reflected that their great-
est reformer and philosopher, the peerless
Socrates, never wrote a line, hut left the
deep impress of his ministry upon their
intellectual and moral life by the use of
incisive speech. John the Baptist was only
a voice, but he was a voice that waked the
dead. It was by the sjjoken word that our
Lord Himself began and completed His won-
derful career. In tliat choice they all acted
rationally and deliberately. It is the spoken
woid that jiicrccs to the core, and secures
innnediate results. There is no disparage-
ment of the i)ress in this judgment. It has
a mighty, a noble, a wide, and enlarging
mission. It is the ally of human speech,
not its enemy or supplanter. So long as
language remains the ex})onent and vehi-
cle of tliought, so h)ng must the lips retain

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 11

the primacy in its expression and enforce-
ment. Speech must remain to the end of
time the chief agency in the dissemination
of truth, and in the inculcation of right-
eousness.

Assuming, then, that you are conscious
of the dignity and of the vital importance
of your calling, as an agency whose neces-
sity is rooted in the moral order of human
life and history, disclosing the evidence of
its Divine appointment in the pertinacity
of its continuance, and in its quiet refusal
to be shelved by studied neglect, or crowded
out of place by competing aspirants, it is
pertinent, before dealing with the specific
elements which should enter into all preach-
ing, to inquire : What is the mission of the
Christian preacher ? What -should be the
ultimate aim of his endeavor? In what
vital, organic, permanent relation does his
vocation stand to the unfolding life of the
world? The traditional answers to these
questions have long been familiar to you ;
but they have dealt more with the construc-
tion of the single sermon, than with the
philosophy of preaching. They have not
brought out distinctly the final cause of all
preaching, in view of which it is seen to be

12 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

ii rational unity amid all the forms which
it has as.suiiK'd, and in whose attainment it
should tuid its perpetual inspiration and its
filial reward.

One large, earnest, aggressive section of
the Christian Church, whose piety and con-
secrated zeal are beyond dispute, maintains
that preaching should not only be evan-
gelical, but evangelistic. The preacher is
simply a herald, and the substance of his
message is the proclamation of the free for-
giveness of sins, and the heritage of eternal
life, through the mediation of Jesus Christ.
In obedience to that gracious assurance,
men are to repent of their sins and believe
on Christ. The message of the pulpit is
mainly to the unconverted, and every new
disciple is regarded as under immediate and
incessant obligation to increase the registiy
of converts. To save souls is said to be
the preacher's business, and the salvation
of the soul is associated with some definite,
formal, and public act of confession and
committal. The preacher, therefore, sIk >ul(l
incessantly urge men to immediate and pro-
nounced decision. The normal life of the
Church is assumed to be one of perpetual
revival, in the restricted sense of that

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 13

phrase. Under such a theory, preaching
becomes hortatory. It never passes beyond
the rudiments of religious instruction. It
may make use of the Pauline epistles, but
it cannot move in their deep and broad
grooves. It is constantly tempted to dis-
count and discourage thorough and system-
atic training in Christian intelligence, and
to make numerical increase the standard
of ministerial efficiency. It counts the con-
verts, it neglects to weigh them. Its am-
munition is speedily exhausted, and it can
live only by frequent change of place. It
is ill adapted to long pastorates, which
demand a wider range of instruction.

I am not condemning the evangelistic
school of preachers. They have been an
immense blessing to Christendom. They
have had, and have still, a providential
mission. We do not want less, but more,
of the evangelistic temper. The revival-
istic form of preaching is the only one which
is suited to pagan communities, and with-
out it no inroads can be made upon the
ignorant and degraded masses of nominal
Christendom. It is needed, too, in the
highest places, where the pride of reason
and the complacency of self-righteousness

14 PIlILOtiOl'IIY OF PREACHING.

resist and resent the claims of the Gospel.
Its fire should burn in the heart of every
herald of the cross. No jjreacher should
permit himself to lose the jDOwer of direct,
searching, practical appeal, and the ever-
lasting "• Now is the day of salvation "
should be the undertone and nionu'ntum of
all his speed). But the evangelistic theory
of preaching is partial. It fails to reach all
classes, and it cannot long hold those whom
it does reach. It has no meat for strono-
men. It is too exclusively emotional, deal-
ing only with the rudiments of religious
truth. It fails to touch the intellectual
and social life of man at a thousand points.
Clu-istianity, as embodying the power and
wisdom of God, must be comprehensive and
cosmopolitan. It must have a message for
all, and it must master all the forces of
civilization. It cannot neglect the univer-
sity in order to redeem the hovel. It has
no choice in the matter, if it be the Word
of God to man ; and hence, in every age,
the Church has been the jjatron of sound
learning and the founder of seliools. There
must ])e ail educated ministry. 'J'here must
be C'hiisliaii seh()lai"s, experts in historical
and literary criticism, equipped with all

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 15

the learning of tlieir day. While therefore
the evangelist has his place, his methods
and aims do not exhaust the function of
preaching, and we must seek for a more
comprehensive statement of the Christian
preacher's mission.

The evangelistic theory of the sermon is
faulty in another respect. When the aim
of preaching is regarded as inciting men to
believe on Christ, that they may be saved,
a twofold danger is imminent. Salvation
is apt to be regarded as synonymous with
future and eternal blessedness, and the re-
lation of faith to such blessedness assumes
a mechanical aspect. The eternal destiny
of a soul is made to hinge upon a single
formal act or word. Tlie BiblicaLauiphasis
is on holiness, not on happiness, on a pres-
ent and progressive purity of life ; and-
faith is the sours halitual fellowship with
God in Christ, by whose Spirit renewing
and sanctifying energy is imparted. The
evangelistic theory of preaching is really
sacramentarian at heart. It assumes that
the cleavage between heaven and hell is
made by the word spoken and heard ; just
as the Romanist confines the grace of eter-
nal redemption to the baptized. It virtu-

16 PIIILOSOl'IIY OF PnEACIIlNG.

ally restricts the operation of the Holy
Spirit within the lines of evangelical
Clmstendom, and makes the pulpit the
tlirone of eternal judgment. But no one
has ever ventured to press the logic to its
inevitable and paralyzing conclusion. The
universal salvation of all avIio die in in-
fancy is an article of Christian faith which
cannot be made to harmonize with the
theory that the design of preaching is to
fix the eternal destiny of souls, to save
them in the sense of getting them into
heaven. That article has been adopted by
the sternest school of Calvinism in our
day. Granting it to be true, it is plain
that the ordinary means of grace camiot
constitute tlie general and fundamental
condition of eternal redemption. The great
majority of the saved are i^i'esumed, by the
theory of infant salvation, to belong to
those who never in this life heard even the
name of Jesus Christ. The sweep of re-
demption is wider than the voice of the
preacher. He is not the representative of
God's judicial action. It will not do to
say that only adults fall under the rule
that eternal destiny hinges upon receiving
or rejecting the Gospel, that infants and

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 17

idiots constitute a gracious and reasonable
exception; for in that case infanticide
might be regarded as a virtue ; and besides,
the exception is so tremendous that it
hopelessly vitiates the generalization which
assumes that preaching is the great sifting
process by which the wheat is separated
from the chaff. It cannot be the preacher's
business to people heaven. He does not
carry the keys of death and of the un-
derworld upon his girdle. The eternal
destinies of men are in God's secret and
unsearchable keeping, and cannot, in con-
sistency with our faith in the salvation of
infants, which we regard as Scripturally
warranted, be supposed to be bound up
with the work assigned to the preacher of
the Gospel. Both in its milder and in its
sterner form, therefore, the evangelistic
theory of preaching fails to be consistent
and satisfactory.

In sharpest contrast with the evangelis-
tic conception of preaching is what I venture
to call the evolutional. It assumes that the
religious life is germinally and potentially
present in every human soul. It substi-
tutes culture and development for conver-
sion. It addi'esses every man as a son of

18 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

God and an lieir of heaven, and endeavors
to stir within him the recognition of these
prerogatives. It makes the sermon a pious
meditation, a devotional monologue, an
emotional deliverance. It claims that in
Cliristian assemblies, at least, the only true
function of preaching is the development
of the religious sentiment, enveloping and
pervading the communit}'. Men are asleep,
jiot dead. They need waking up, not resur-
rection from a moral grave. This theory
of the sermon finds its most illustrious ad-
vocate and exponent in Schleiermacher, and
in the German pulpit its influence has been
mai'ked and salutary. It crowded the shal-
low and lifeless rationalism to tlie Avail, b}"
the universal basis for religion wliich it
found in human nature, in the sense of abso-
lute dependence. Maurice, Kingsley, and
Robertson are notable representatives of the
same school, and this form of the sermon
is characteristic of Broad Churchmanship.
Robertson's frequent thrusts at the Evan-
gelicals are not due to slight and occasional
divei'gencies in doctrinal judgment, but to
radical difference of method in dealing with
men. Tlicy addressed men as sinners, avIio
could be made the sons of God only by

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHi:S-G. 19

a supernatural act of grace ; he regarded
adoption as a universal act in Christ, tlie
indefeasible dignity and heritage of every
child of Adam, a treasure hidden in the
field, of whose existence every man should
be apprized. Thus the burden of the ser-
mon becomes, " you_are_saved," not " flee
from the wrath to come." Whatever judg-"
ment may be passed upon this theory of
preaching, the earnestness and power of its
exponents cannot be called in question.
They have sapped and undermined the
movement toward Unitarianism.

The profound and permanent revolution
inaugurated by Schleiermacher is familiar
to every student of religious life in Ger-
many. In his own case the theory of the
sermon grew out of his theological system,
so far as he had any. It is difficult to class
him. He was a pantheist in philosophy, a
Calvinist in his doctrine of decrees, a
Universalist in his conception of the scope
of redemption. The incarnation was the
historical emergence and expression of a
universal fact. The mediation of Christ
involved a universal restoration to holiness.
The decree of God is one and singular,
executed in the final and eternal extinc-

NO

20 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

tion of evil. Effectual calling is universal.
At the core of the most irabruted soul
hides and tliro)>s tlie indestructible germ
of life, ^v^apped about by the sheathings of
ignorance and sin. To tear off tliese l)and-
ages, and to give that hidden life its oppor-
tunity of expression and expansion, is the
business of the preacher. The soul of man
is religious by creative constitution ; it is
Christian by the redemptive energy of the
Son of God. Faith is its normal life,
through the feeling of absolute de^jend-
ence, -which no amount of scejiticism or
immorality can eradicate.

"With such a philosophical l)asis, the ser-
mon could be nothing else tluin a gentle,
persuasive appeal to the muffled inner man.
Kor can it admit any exception. It must
speak the same language in Pekin as in
Berlin ; and if it has failed to evangelize
the capital of German Christendom, its
mond energy will not suffice to storm tlie
citadels of heathenism. It may work aacII
Avith a limited class, but the limitation of
its clhciency i)roves that the theory U}>on
which it is Ijased docs not agree with the
stubborn facts. Cliristlieb pronounces it
an ideal conception, sometliing to be earn-

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 21

estly and devoutly hoped for and kept in
view, but he insists that the aggressive and
missionary vocation of the Church demands
also the evangelistic form of preaching, with
its pungent and urgent summons to imme-
diate repentance. But all men need to hear
and heed that call. The new birth is a
universal necessity. The incompleteness
of Schleiermacher's method lies in the fact
that his diagnosis of human nature is par-
tial. He has read only half its testimony.
He emphasizes dependence, to the neglect *"Vf'f >
of ()l)ligation. He has interrogated the
emotions, but not the conscience. He sees
the universal restlessness and weakness of
man more vividly than he does his univer-
sal and wilful wickedness. He does not
apprehend the exceeding sinfulness of sin.
The majesty of the moral law does not
receive adequate recognition at his hands.
The dependence of man is at once constilu-
tional and moral ; in its highest form it is
the equivalent of duty. i\.nd duty implies
the opposite of weakness. It proclaims
man's dignity and unqualified personal re-
sponsibility for his moral state ; " I ought "
means " I can, if I will," and that makes
the will in man the target of moral assault

22 PHILOSOPHY OF PEEALIllNU.

and appeal. The evolutional or devotional
theory of preaching overlooks these stern
facts, and cannot therefore be accepted as
defining the preacher's vocation.

Shall we combine the two? Shall we
say that preaching should be both evange-
listic and educational, that it should aim at
conversion and edification? That Avould
seem to be the natural conclusion, and it
is the theory upon which many preachers
act. They divide their audiences into saints
and sinnei"s. They address one class in the
morning, and the second class in the even-
ing ; and if the evening is stormy, the saints
get what was intended for the siiniers. Or,
the sermon ends witli a twofold application,
one to believers, and the other to the unre-
gcnerate. Such a method cannot fail to
jjroduce mental confusion and distraction.
The audience is not treated as a unit, and
no one hearer gets the full force of the mes-
sage. And, yet, this is unavoidable, if the
preacher construes his vocation as involv-
ing, fii-st, the elimination, through the }>roe-
lamation of the Gospel, from the mass of
mankind, of those who are chosen unto
eternal life; and second, the tiaining of
Christian Ijclicvcrs in doctrine, eliarat-tcr,

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 23

and active service. No mortal man is com-
petent to work along these parallel lines
with equal and balanced effectiveness. He
will inevitably gravitate to one extreme, or
the other, adopting either the liortatory or
the didactic as his ordinary and favorite
tone, unless he can combine the two in
some higher and inclusive method. It is
evident, too, that under such a working
theory, the pulpit must be content with a
comparatively narrow and restricted field.
It is debarred, by its own act, from influenc-
ing public opinion and life at a thousand
vital points, bringing upon it the charge of
indifference to present and practical evils,
through its absorption in the invisible and
the future. A double, or twofold theory
of preaching discredits itself; for unity is
the test of philosophical analysis; and a
theory which makes preaching a separat-
ing or sifting agency, intent upon the en-
largement and edification of the Christian
Church, surrenders the universality of its
outlook, and j^roclaims itself to be simply
an instrument of ecclesiastical proselytism.
And for myself, I want both unity in the
philosophy, and universality in the out-
look.

n.

Ix till' })rfcc'(liiig lecture the question
was raised: What is the ultimate aim of
preaching, the single and comprehensive
practical })urpose which the preacher should
have in mind, in all his studies, in the
preparation and in the delivery of every
sermon ? Sermons have been divided into
textual and topical ; into expository, doc-
trinal, experimental, and practical ; into
hortatoiy and didactic ; hut these divisions
are in order only when the germinal idea
of the sermon has been clearly thrown into
conscious relief. There is something in
the true sermon which distinguishes it
from every other form of public speech.
Nor is tliat distinction due simply to the
contents. The form is hardly less impor-
tant than the matter, and form is largely
determined by the presence or the al)sence
of deliberate intention. Each sermon will
24

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 25

have its specific intention, but all the ser-
mons of a year, and of a lifetime, are prop-
erly an orderly and progressive unity ; in
which, to use the phraseology of Herbert
Spencer, the integration keeps pace witli
the differentiation. The sermon has its
definite place and purpose, and to these it
should be held as rigidly as the planets are
held by the force of gravity.

Nor does the preacher stand alone. He
belongs to a great, living army, whose num-
bers must keep step together, and move
along many widely separated lines, and by
many different paths, towards a common
goal. There is not one law for the metrop-
olis, and another for the frontier settlement ;
one law for nominally Christian commun-
ions, and another for pagan populations.
Consciously or unconsciously, intentionally
or otherwise, the preaching of any age is a
vital and vitalizing unity, a definite force
designed, in the Divine plan, to produce a
definite result.

The generations, too, are interlocked.
There is such a thing as an integration of
dispensations, an evolution of history, which
is but another name for the march of God's
redemptive thought. In this evolution and

26 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

march preaching has its appointed j)lace ;
and though, for purposes of literary criti-
cism, we may distinguish between modern,
and mediaeval, and apostolic, and prophetic,
and ante-diluvian preaching, the classifica-
tion must proceed upon a principle which
introduces unity into the diversity. The
preaching of Noah was very different from
that of Paul, both in form and in substance,
in point of time and range of thought ; but
so far as both preached, tliere must liave
been identity in the Divine intention.
Preaching is like a wide-branching oak
or elm, Avhose every twig and leaf are
nourished and colored by the sap which
flows from tlie tap-root. It is not a dis-
tinctively Christian agency. It had a re-
markable history in the eighth and succeed-
ing centuries before Christ, wliose records
are preserved for us in the proplietic books
of the Scriptures, and whose mighty influ-
ence upon subsequent Jewish life is not
even yet adecpiately understood. It was
jDrominent and powerful in the days of
Samuel, in whom again we discover only a
revival of the spirit of Moses. The })rophet
was the true oracle of the theocracy ; its initi-
ating, conserving, guiding foree. Not Uj)on

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 27

Aaron, but upon Moses, rested the common-
wealth of Israel. By the hands of a prophet
the Decalogue was given, and by prophets
the will of God was made known. Tem-
ple and sacrifice belonged to the vanishing
form of the dispensation, but the prophet
was master of a universal tongue, and his
speech is as pungent and piercing as ever.
Preaching has only become more frequent
and widely diffused, with a larger store of
truth at its command ; but though the
stream has deepened and widened, the
pulse and push of the fountain-head remain
unchanged. And if we want to know what
the preacher's definite vocation is, we can-
not afford to neglect inquiring into the
philosophy of prophecy ; for prophecy con-
stitutes the vital bond between the Mosaic
and Christian dispensations. The priest
has gone, the prophet remains ; first in
appearance, perpetual in his ministry.

Advancing, then, from negative criticism
to positive statement, let me begin by say-
ing that, in my judgment, no better and
more helpful definition of the preacher's
vocation has been given, in recent years,
than the one to which the first incumbent
of this lectureship gave expression, sup-

28 rillLOSOPllY OF PRKACniXG.

portiiio- it l)y an appeal to the words
of Paul ill his Epistle to ^ the Ephe-
siaiis. '• Reconstructed Manhood^'''' was the
vivid phrase into which he packed his
theory of the sermon ; and if we may i)re-
suine that he entertained no individualistic
resti'iction, l)ut had in mind a reconstructed
humanity or liuman society, a redeemed
race of mortal men and women on earth,
the definition may he accepted as complete
and comprehensive. It certainly supplies
the preacher Avith something definite and
tangihle. It makes liim deal Avith men as
they are, as needing moral reconstruction,
and it urges him to look for immediate and
practical results in life and conduct. The
Gospel becomes a living message to living-
men. Salvation means a present manhood
after the ideal in Christ, through the in-
strumentality of Divine truth and by the
agency of the Holy Spirit ; not a boon to
be secured at death. It is the man in his
mortal body Avith aaOioui the preacher AA'res-
tles, instead of lixing liis thoughts upon
the disembodied spiiit. The heaven into
Avhieli he urges men is tlie reign of right-
eousness on eartli : tlie hell fVom which
he AN'oultl phick tlieni, as l)raiids I'roni the

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 29

burning, is the hell of greed and lust,
of brutal passion and degraded life. He
makes holiness urgent now and always.
He insists upon an immediate and radical
repentance, a change of conviction issuing
in a new creation, whose order and beauty
transfigure a prosaic and busy world.
Eternity is to make time radiant by the
triumph of righteousness in all lands. All
powers of body and soul, all achievements
of industry, learning and art, the life of
home and the policies of nations, are to
answer with joyful alacrity the touch of
Christ's pierced hands.

Cicero said of Socrates that " he caused
philosophy to descend from heaven to
earth, to enter into the cities and homes
of men," by his conception of wisdom as
dealing with the principles and the prac-
tice of personal and political virtue. It
was a great and fruitful revolution in the
method and aim of speculative thought.
And the theory of preaching which con-
centrates all its attention upon the recon-
struction of human society, urging indi-
vidual repentance and regeneration with
a view to pervasive and universal moral
rectitude, lirings the pulpit into living

30 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

touch -Nvitli all that concerns human weal.
It answers the severe tests of unity and
universality, without which no philosophy
can establish its claim to truth. It has the
same message for every man, in every age
and in every clime. It invests the present
life, and the march of history, with a sig-
nificance which the probationary theory of
our present existence does not, and cannot,
give to it. It makes the ethical the real
eternal ; and l)i(Ls us look for the golden
streets, and the gates of pearl, and the
walls of jasj^er, as the glory of a city which
is to descend out of heaven, to become the
capital of an earthly em})ire. It looks upon
literature and art, upon commerce and gov-
ernment, as subject to the authority which
it represents, and as destined to become its
powerful allies. It claims all liuman life
as its own, to be purified, sweetened, en-
larged by its Divine ministry. It preaches
the same old Gospel, but it makes the
message intensely urgent and practical. It
demands not only decision, but obedience, a
faith whose fruit is abundant and precious.
It does not save here that it may reap here-
after. It wants to fill the irarners of earth

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 31

to overflowing-, that God may be honored
and men may be blessed.

It is true that preaching has never been
able wholly to ignore the importance of the
present, earthly life, and has always insisted
that true relio-ion encourages and uro-es to
true morality. But the emphasis has been
oftener, and more generally, upon future
destiny than upon present character. The
old formula, that out of the Church there
is no salvation, meant that the gates of
heaven opened only at the bidding of the
priest. And the Protestant tests of faith
and repentance, or of an experimental
knowledge of Christ's saving power, have
been regarded in the same way, as evi-
dences here of what their professors shall
secure hereafter. Hence the charges and
countercharges of Romanist and Protestant,
that religion and morality, piety and purity,
have been sundered or united by artificial
bonds. Hence the charge so frequently
made that popular and traditional Christi-
anity makes virtuous conduct of no prac-
tical account, by its doctrines of priestly
absolution or of saving faith ; and that in
this matter Luther is as great a sinner as
Tetzel, as in either case it is the state after

32 PIIILOSOrilY OF PREACHING.

death which ah.sorl)s attention. I'or my-
self, I must frankly confess tliat the grave
charge has only too much truth in it; and
that tliei'e is hut little relief in urging that
an assured hope of heaven cannot fail to
make a man pm-e. The sad facts do not
bear out the statement; for the greatest
scandals have come from men who have
been loudest in affirming the assurance of
salvation; and l)esides, it does not, to say
the least, seem to l)e a ver}- high morality
which cultivates decency in l)ehavior under
the pressure of future reward. There is
certainly nuuh to commend a theory of
the preacher's vocation, which compels an
emphasis upon present character, and which
deals with the hereafter only incidentally
and by implication. I am not sure but it
would be wise to give to the doctrine of an
earthly probation a different theological
turn ; so that, instead of saying that every
man's eternal destiny is determined at
death, we sliould allirm that the preacher's
vocation deals directly only witli the life
on this side of the grave. Let him do his
utmost to make the life of God, and the
grace of Jesus Christ, real in tlie men and
women to whom he speaks and among

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 33

wliom he lives, and he may encourage
them to be fearless of that future whose
secrets are pierced only by the eyes of om-
niscience. It may seem as if the idea of
reconstructed manhood, or of a redeemed
human society on earth, is a serious nar-
rowing of the preacher's vocation, but it
has the advantage of a clearly outlined
task, in whose performance he touches all
men in the use of all their faculties. And
if it should appear that this conception
pervades the Scriptures, and constitutes the
unvarying undertone of its most impres-
sive appeals, woven into its history, color-
ing alike its precepts and its promises,
breathed in its prayers and its praises,
stirring in its prophecies and pealing in its
judgments, it will be the part of wisdom
to bring ourselves into close and loving
adjustment with the methods and aims of
those who spake as they were moved by
the Holy Ghost.

Now, the very structure of the Bible is
such as to suggest that preaching was de-
signed to be a historical agency for the
moral training of the race, instead of a
means for the determination of personal,
eternal destiny. Upon the latter assump-

34 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHINO.

tion, the long delay in the advent of Christ,
and the acknowledged imperfection of all
preceding revelation, constitute a most se-
rious embarrassment in any attempted vin-
dication of the impartial justice and love
of God. It may be defended on the plea
of the Divine sovereignty, as unconditional
and inscrutable ; but such a logical proce-
dure is too summary for Christian intelli-
gence. I am not surprised that modern
theodicies, starting with the assumption
that the Gospel is to be preached among
all nations in order that the elect may be
gathered into heaven, are pushed to the
conclusion that the gracious proclamation
must be continued through the intermedi-
ate state, in order that every soul may have
its equal and full opportunity for intelligent
and deliberate action. The vice in the
logic is in the major premise, for which I
have failed to find any su})[)()rt in the Word
of God. Preaching appears, througliout
the inspired pages, as a historical agency,
Avidening in its scope, increasing in the in-
tensity of its power, accumulating its stores
of truth, designed and iitted to produce a
historical result.

The Bible is the most liviuo- of all books.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 35

Every chapter and [)aragrapli, every psalm
and prayer and prophecy, bears tlie birth-
mark of some great and earnest souL It is
the fragmentary record of sixteen centuries,
more correctly of forty-one centuries of Di-
vine education ; starting with the promise
of the serpent-bruiser, and crowned by the
sublime Gospel from the pen of John. If
its creation was a vital, historical evolution,
what can its mission be, now that it is
winged and fully ecpiipped for its task, but
a historical leavening of the life of human-
ity which shall be commensurate with the
long story of its production? An instru-
ment which was forged and shaped in the
fires and on the anvils of four thousand
years, while cities were built, and wars
were waged, and empires vanished, and
great literatures were created, all of them
meanwhile preparing the opportunity of
its use, and opening a path for the display of
its power, must have for its immediate aim
a subjugation and transfiguration of terres-
trial life, whose sublime grandeur no fancy
can sketch, and which can find expression
only in the extraordinary imagery of the
Apocalypse. The dream of Babylon's fa-
mous king is involuntarily recalled, where

36 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

the huge image of gold, silver, brass, iron,
and clay, representing the march of political
history, is smitten by the stone, hurled of
unseen hands, grinding the image into pow-
der, and covering the whole earth. Such an
issue, the universal reign of righteousness
on earth, makes luminous the long and
severe educational process which culmi-
nated in the advent of Jesus Christ, and
in the apostolic ministrj^

A second corroborative f)roof that preach-
ing is a divinely appointed agency for the
accomplishment of a historical result, is
found in the comparative silence of Holy
Scripture on the life beyond the grave. I
say comparative silence, because personal
immortality is involved, by necessary impli-
cation, in its doctrine of what God is, and
in its description of His relation to man as
created in His image, and summoned to in-
timate and confidential fellowsliip with Him.
But the future life is not the great burden
of its revelation. There is no explicit af-
firmation of it in the Pentateuch. Only
once does its ho})e burst from the lips of
Job, and even then the meaning of his
words is not perfectly clear. In the lofti-
est psalms it finds only vague expression.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 37

The prophets maintain the same strange
reserve. All through the Old Testament,
Hades is the underworld shrouded in im-
penetrable gloom ; and the disembodied
state is not regarded as an abode of rest,
nor as the transfer to a higher sphere.
Not until we reach the New Testament and
read the story of our Lord's resurrection do
we come to clear visions of the future. The
gloom vanishes ; the ancient silent faith
speaks out in jubilant tones, that to have
died and so to be with Christ is far better.
But even here the revelation is scanty, and
leaves a thousand questions unanswered.
Uninterrupted personal identity, and an
advance in blessedness, we may confidently
affirm for all who die in the Lord ; but even
for them there is something lacking until
Christ shall come at the end of the world ;
while the state of the impenitent dead is
veiled in startling imagery, whose exact
import we cannot determine.

There is certainly something very sug-
gestive and impressive in this silence and
in these scanty references. If they do not
form the staple of revelation, they certainly
cannot properly be the burden of our preach-
ing. The field surveyed is the earth, human

38 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

life in its present moral conditions, capaci-
ties, and obligations. It is altogether an in-
ade(|nate statement of the ease to say that
the Bil)le represents the present earthly
life as the only period of nioial prol)ation.
It does more than that. It deals with the
future life only by indirection, as a corol-
lary or implication at most, while the per-
vading or overshadowing emphasis is on
the life that now is. The Old Testament
thought moves, almost exclusively, ^\ itliiu
the limits of temporal rewarcis and punish-
ments, tlie present blessedness of the man
of God, and the shame which sliall surely
come over the wicked ; while in tlie New
Testament precept and promise bear a pre-
ponderant relation to present godliness.
Oiu" current methods invert all this. We
labor for revivals, we pray for the baptism
of the Holy Ghost, we urge men to come
to Christ, with our tlioughts fixed upon
the grave, and upon the Avord of ho2)e that
may be spoken over the man Avhen he is
gone. We believe that this A\-orld is a lost
world, and yet it.s condenniation and ruin
are practically viewed as in suspense, pro-
spective calamities to be avoided and escaped
by fleeing to Christ as the appointed refuge

PHILOSOPHY OB' PREACHING. 39

from tlie coming wrath. And so we teach
and sing :

" While the lamp holds out to bui-n,
The vilest sinner may return."

We do not mean to pLace a premium
upon deathbed repentances, we do not mean
to encourage dissoluteness of life ; but the
moral imperative, demandiiig immediate
and obedient recognition, is shorn of its
majestic might by the undertone of an
appeal to prudential motives. Salvation is
made an affair of commercial barter, where
men pay a certain price and secure a fut-
ure gain. If prudential considerations
must play a part in securing repentance,
ought we not to adopt the prophetic and
apostolic method, in which the judgment
of God is represented as in actual and fear-
ful execution upon all who repress the
truth in unrighteousness ? It is a personal,
earthly, historical judgment which Paul so
tersely outlines in his first chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans. The current pa-
gan life, with its universal license, with its
unnatural crimes, with its degradation of
the home, with its political cruelty, law-
lessness, and insecurity, Avas a revelation

40 PHILOSOPHY OF PPKACHING.

of the Divine iiuligiiation, wlio.se righteous
fury woukl smite men more and more se-
verely, unless they repented and ('(.'asLMl
doing evil. Tlie epistles are full of the
homeliest instructions and appeals, man}-
of wliifli are disguised in our translation,
and which wc sliould hardly dare to rc[)ro-
duee in their original ])lainness, all of them
bearing upon the necessity of an immediate
and radical change in the existing life.
The univei"sal emphasis is on present char-
acter and condition, and a revival of bil>
lical preaching mtist deal boldly, almost
exclusively, with the mortal life of men.
Sin brings present disgrace and ruin to
body and soul, to home and country : it
breeds distrust, it enervates manhood and
womanhood, it incites to murderous re-
venge, it arrays class against class, it
kindles the volcanic iire of social hate, it
is a menace to domestic peace, to social
order, and to international amity ; and from
all this there is salvation only by that per-
sonal integrity and social righteousness
which are the free gift of God to men by
faith in Jesus Christ. Is not that the bur-
den of ( )ld 'I'estiiineiit prophecy? Is it not
tlic hiTnel of llir I'linline lou'ic. wlicli \)\

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 41

an argument purely historical in his great
epistle, he shows that the Gospel alone is
competent to do Avhat the wisdom of the
Greek, and the law of Moses, had failed
to accomplish? The pierced hands, alone
can rescue the world out of that abyss
of Avoe into whose fathomless depths sin
is hurling it with an ever accelerated ac-
tivity. Here is your task and mine, as it
was that of prophets and apostles before
us, to make this earth the abode of purity
and the paradise of God.

Look once more into your Bibles, and
note that central phrase around which all
its practical admonitions cluster and re-
volve, as planets around the sun. In the
earliest biography of our Lord's life and
ministry, we are told that Jesus '"• came into
Galilee preaching the Gospel of the king-
dom of God, and saying. The time is ful-
filled, and the kingdom of God is at hand,
repent ye, and believe the Gospel." What
was the Gospel? It was the glad tidings
that "the kingdom of God" was at hand;
and men were urged to change their minds
and believe the announcement. They were
summoned to abandon their dream of polit-
ical rule, and to accept citizenship in that

42 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

moral empire, whose laws He expounded,
and f)f which IIo clainii'd to Ix" King. That
was the l)Ui(lcii of His poi-sonal niinistiy, as
it had been lliat (if His tdrciuiiiR'r. Around
that CQUception of a Divine kinyfdom, Mat-
thew weaves tlie materials of his (liospel.
Christ is a Kiiii^. the Founder of a new and
univei"sal theocracy. The Sermon on the
Mount holds the same jjlace in ^Matthew's
sketch, M liich the book of the law has in
the Pentateuch. It expounds the condi-
tions and the duties of citizenshi]) in the
new commonwealth. The i)aral)les illus-
trate its nature, its purifying power, its
ex])anding energy, and its sifting processes.
Tlie forty days between the resurrection
and tlie ascension weie devoted to instruc-
tions "pertaining to the kingdom of God,"
and the Ijook of Acts ends with the state-
ment that Paul, upon liis arrival at Rome,
gathered the chief of the Jews together,
and expounded to them, by an appeal to
Moses and tlie j»roi)hets, the doctrine of
Clu'ist, and of ••the kingdoiii of (iod."

It was not a m-w phrase upon the lips of
the liaj)tist: it had been the watcliword of
]»atience, and of liope. tliioiigli many w faiy
centuries. It Mas tlie keyimte of jnoplietic

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 43

warning and encouragement, and it meant
the rule of God in all the earth, the house
of the Lord becoming the resort of worship
for all nations. The blessing of the cove-
nant was to be the heritage of all races and
lands. Against the carnal and political
methods by which that sovereignty was
hoped to be secured, our Lord most ear-
nestly protested ; but he mustered his disci-
ples under the same banner, and summoned
them to the same work, when He taught
them to pray, " Thy kingdom come. Thy
will be done in earth as it is in heaven,"
petitions which are also promises and proph-
ecies. And hence it was that the apostolic
emphasis, in preaching and in epistle, was
ever upon the return of Jesus Christ in
power and in glory. It was not death, but
the second advent, upon which the disciples
fixed their gaze. They were busy prepar-
ing the way for the King, watching for
Him with trimmed and burning lamps.
They Avere understood by many to teach
that the final coming was near at hand, and
the Church fell into chiliastic dreams, from
which she was rudely awakened by the
barbarian invasion and the fall of Rome.
That opened for her the path to a new

44 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

(l()iniiii()ii, aii<l iiispiiccl lici- willi the anil)i-
tioii of universal empire, in securing and
consolidating which she freely employed
the methods of political intrigue, and the
agency of the sword. She grasped the
cro\Mi, and burnt her preachers. Luther's
hammer Avrecked the ambitious project, and
the last remnants of ecclesiastical despot-
ism arc vanishing. The Pope is a prisoner
in his own palace, a stranger in his own
city, and at any moment he may be
an involuntary exile. Rome's idea of the
kingdom of God has proved to be as base-
less as the earlier fancies. And yet, that
kingdom is the practical theme of revela-
tion, the keynote of all dispensations. It is
not of the world, and yet it is to conquer
tlie world. It is not to come with obser-
vation, heralded by startling phenomena,
shaking thrones and convulsino- nations,
and yet its advent is to be with irresistible
might. It is lightcousiu'ss, and peace, and
joy, in the Holy CJhost. That is the ad-
vent upon which the gaze of eveiy disci-
ple is to be fixed, and wliose hastening
should enlist the preaclier's zeal.

In a word, the hlHtorical ir'nnnph of Cliris-
tianity is the iinnu'diatc and practical result

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 45

designed to be attained by tbe preaching of
the Gospel. We make the world's evan-
gelization, the discipling of all nations, in-
cidental and subordinate ; it is, in reality,
supreme and exclusive. The present pro-
saic earth is the territory which we are
summoned to subdue to the obedience of
Jesus Christ. Here, where sin threw down
the gauge of battle and made man an exile
from Paradise, the conflict is to be fought
out to its bitter end, until Eden comes back
with a fairer and a perennial beauty. What
socialism blindly aims at through revolu-
tionary and anarchial measures, Chris-
tianity is fitted and destined to accomplish
for man. The cry of the poor is to be
answered. Every burden is to be loosed,
every yoke of oppression is to be broken.
Ignorance is to be supplanted by the wis-
dom whose beginning is the fear of the
Lord. Drunkenness is to be exterminated,
and Sabbath desecration is to cease. The
monster of lust is to be cast into the bottom-
less pit. The meek are to inherit the earth.
The idolatries and cruelties of Paganism
are to be swept away. And all this is to
be done, not by repressive and punitive
legislation, but by the expansive and con-

46 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

quering energy of the Holy Spirit, enter-
ing into individual souls, through faith in
^/^esus Clnist as He is revealed in the Gospel.
That is only a means to an end, an epi-
sode in a larger history. Beyond it lie the
day of judgment and the eternal years,
with their unfolding story which God has
reserved to Himself. The philosophy of
mortal history is all that has been disclosed
to us, and that we have been slow to mas-
ter. We have been more curious than con-
secrated. Whatever mighty results the
volume of the future may contain, the
introductory chapter concerns the present
conquest of humanity to righteousness,
until the wilderness shall blossom as the
rose, and the lion and the lamb shall lie
down in j^eace together. Earth is the
battle ground of the eternities, and moral
forces are to determine tlie issue of the
encounter.
~r This conception makes the Christian
pulpit a living, burning, per})etual need.
The vocation of the jjreacher is seen to
stand in organic relation to the develop-
ment of human history. He l)lazes the
way to the appointed goal, and marshals
the growing and victorious battalions along

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 47

the widening highway. This is the vision
of prophets and apostles, of Daniel in idola-
trous Babylon, and of John in the isle of
Patmos. The kingdoms of this world are
to become the kingdom of our God, and of
His Christ, and He is to reign forever and
ever. It requires no ordinary faith to be-
lieve this. It demands no ordinary courage
to confess it in the face of doubt and denial.
It seems fihimerical. The pessimistic esti-
mate of the world's future is more congenial
to the reigning temper. It is so much easier
to wait for a catastrophe, than to convert
the world by the foolishness of preaching.
We get weary of the strain, and long for
the descending fire, the advent of our Lord.
But He is here. His banners are unfurled,
and He bids us unite with the Sword of the
Spirit, which is the Word of God. This,
then, I conceive to be the Scriptural theory
of the Christian preacher's vocation, the
Divine philosophy of his commission, the
reconstruction of humanity, the historical
triumph of Christianity in all the earth.

I am aware that such an interpretation
of the final cause of preaching will seem,
at first inspection, to divest it of any special
Divine significance, and to reduce it to a

48 rillLOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

very ordinary agency for securing moral
improvement. The peculiar idea of re-
demption seems to be eliminated, and the
immortality of the soul appeai-s to be re-
duced to an inference, which might as well
be explicitly ignored. But neither of these
inferences is logically involved in the doc-
trine here propounded and defended. Tlie
matter of preaching remains exactly the
same, in its essential basis, and in the logi-
cal order of its separate doctrines. The
supernatural revelation of God for the
redemption of man, culminating in the per-
son and mediation of our Lord, and con-
tinued through the personal ministry of
the Holy Spirit, is assumed and most ear-
nestly maintained. The profound biblical
conceptions of sin, and law, and atonement,
and regeneration, are not divested of their
supernatural import, and relegated to the
vocabulary of natiu-al ethics. I am not
pleading for another Gospel, nor for a new
and attenuated version of the old Gospel,
but for such a use of it as shall deal with
man as lie is, and shall secure his present
redemption from the power and pollution
of sin. Use the same lifle, powder, and ball,
but aim low. I liave no conlidence in the

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 49

preaching which confines itself to the expo-
sition of ethical maxims, which nrges men
to avoid falsehood and vice on the ground
of the constitutional dignity of human
nature, which does not introduce tlie mo-
tives growing out of a veritable Divine
intervention, and wliich ignores the sanc-
tions of the Divine judgment ; for upon
such a view, Socrates and Confucius are
older, and so far, better authorities than
Jesus Christ. For all literature has its
tragic undertone, and the altar is every-
where the confession of sin, and a memorial
of fear. Man needs Divine redemption.
Something must be done for him. Hu-
manity must be rescued by the hand of
God, as well as startled by His voice and
welcomed to His heart. It must be born
from above. Its prison doors mast be
broken, its manacles must be melted, the
tide of death must be checked and reversed
in the prisoner's veins. Reformation will
not answer ; it only administers anodynes,
whose only effect is to retard for a season
the inevitable collapse. Socrates did not
save Greece ; the Stoics did not save Rome ;
Confucius and Sakya-Mouni have not saved
China and India. Ethical injunctions will

50 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

not save man ; the experiment has been
widely tried, and it has always been a sad
and conspicuous failure. Plumanity needs
a Redeemer, an historical and personal
descent of the living God into the stream
of its poisoned life, if that life is to be
cleansed and sweetened. And this is the
burden of the Gospel, that God was in
Christ reconciling tlie world unto Himself.
That was more than a roi)ublication of the
moral law. It ^^'as more than the I'evela-
tion of God's universal Fatherhood. Love
wins and conquers by what it does, not by
what it says, and the glad tidings of the
New Testament are in what Jesus Christ did
for men, and in the abiding energy of that
work. The pierced hands are no myth,
the broken heart is no accident, the open
grave is no poetic fancy. They reveal
much ; they have achieved, and are achiev-
ing more. The air is not more indispensa-
ble to physical life than is Jesus Christ to
man's redemption. jNIy aim has been to set
forth the tremendous realism of the eternal
priesthood of Jesus Christ, its profound
historical necessity, and its design as a his-
torical fact, to produce a dclinitc historical
result, — the redemption of man.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 51

Nor, under this conception of the x)reach-
er's vocation, is man to be treated as the crea-
ture of time. That would be an irrational
procedure, for the simple reason that man's
spirit bears the image of God, and is there-
fore immortal in its essential constitution.
You must address him as the child and heir
of eternity; only you need to remember
that the eternity which thus crowns him is
not prospective merely, Ijut present. All
that he does and is has eternal significance.
It is unending in duration of effect, because
it is eternal in present quality. It is an
unscriptural distinction which limits time
to the present and eternity to the future.
The present moment is all that has reality,
and time and eternity are only different
faces of the NOW. " The things that are
seen are temporal, the things that are not
seen are eternal," says the great apostle.
And everywhere, at every moment, the
seen and the unseen confront us. They
meet in our composite personality ; the vis-
ible body is temporal, the invisible soul is
eternal. They balance and interpenetrate
each other in what we call the universe ;
so far as it is visible, it is temporal and
changing, but its invisible energy, as rooted

52 PHILOSOPHY OF PRKArillXC.

in the will <>t llie Living God, is iiiunutablc,
constant, flcrnal. That is tlie Pauline dis-
tinction, and it embodies the j^i'ofoundest
pliilosophy. He does not say that the vis-
ible is unreal, nor does lie say that the in-
visible is ideal ; he is neither an idealist
nor a materialist. The visible and the in-
visibh' are c(Hially real ; Paul speaks as a
natural dualist. Hut the invisible is the
root of the visible. It is the innnutable,
constant, eternal |)riii(i])lr of tlie changing
and transient, ^\'herever tlu' invisible is,
there is the eternal : and if there be an
omnipresent, invisible God, eternity is con-
densed into every flying minute. Every
conscious, responsible soul holds the awful
secret in its grasp. In virtue of its consti-
tutional iclalionship to (iod, and in virtue
of its natural sonshij), its ])resi'nt attitude
and action are invested with eti'rnal signi-
ficance, lumiortality is not eliiniiiated, but
it is traced to its living root, in the invisible
spirit, and eternity shows its majestic face
behind the thin veil of time.

The truth is that our jjliilosophy of mor-
tal life has been altogether too meagre.
Our estimate of history has been singularly
inadeijuate. We have bi-eii disposed to

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 53

regard the present life as full onl}' of
vanity, as indeed it is to him who uses
it mainly for eating, drinking, getting rieh
and being merry. We have rattled the
skeleton in men's faces. We have taken
our practical theology from Ecclesiastes,
instead of from the Gospel of John. But
now is the acce[)ted time, noiv is the day of
salvation. The air is full of sunshine and
song. The last days are upon us, in which
God has spoken to us by His Son, and set
up His tabernacle among men. The future
has no dignity which does not fill each
passing hour, and eternity is the pulse, the
throbbing heart, of time. And, therefore,
the present life is not a temporary scaffold-
ing, a period of moral })rol)ation, Ijut the
deep and broad foundation which God is
laying by human hands for the temple of
His building; and the history, slowly syl-
labling itself in the world's redemption, is
the first and formative chapter in the glo-
rious records of the future. Present life
alid present history are eternal, of intrin-
sic and imperishable worth. To save men,
then, in their mortal bodies, and to sub-
due the earth unto righteousness, through
the preaching of the Gospel, is to give to

54 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

eternity its living place in the annals of
time.

For more than ten years I liave rested in
this conclusion, and each review has only
confirmed my confidence in its correctness.
It has given me poise and gladness amid
the eschatological discussions whii-h have
disturbed our theological schools, and
which have man-ed the peace of our mis-
sionary gatherings. I have felt that I had
other work to do than to frame theories as
to how God would deal with those who
have never heard the Gos])el. I do not
know what lie will do witli tliose who
hear the Gospel from my lips. The rejec-
tion of my message may not involve their
eternal perdition. I am not the organ of
God's retributive justice, and I would not
be for ten thousand worlds. The inter-
mediate state is a terra incognita^ on which
I have ceased to speculate, simply because
human reason is incompetent to conduct
the debate to any certain issue, and because
the Scriptures liave not been made the ve-
hicle of any revelation on the subject.
The dead are in God's hands, where Ave
should l)e both conti'ut and glad to leave
them; the living millions are on your

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 55

hands and mine, and tliey slionld burden
our hearts. Surely, on this ground we can
clasp hands, and push to the utmost the
energies of Christian activity, until their
widening lines shall compass all the na-
tions. Until then, the Christian pulpit
must remain as the mightiest of conserva-
tive moral forces, and as the most potent
of all aggressive regenerating agencies.

It seems to me that this theory of preach-
ing unites the evangelistic and evolutional
conceptions in a higher, single, comprehen-
sive formula. It agrees with the evange-
listic in recognizing this world as a lost
world, as dead in trespasses and sins, as
exposed to imminent and eternal judgment,
as summoned in these last days to immedi-
ate repentance, and requiring that renewing
and sanctifying energy of the Holy Spirit,
which is connected with an obedient faith
in the Gospel, for its rescue. It does not
ignore the individual in the universality
of its outlook. It accentuates personal
responsibility. It paints sin in the darkest
colors. It maintains the majesty of moral
law. It knoAvs only Christ and Him cruci-
fied, as the sinner's hope of pardon and
purity. It addresses each man as an im-

56 PIIILOSOI'IIY OF PREACHINO.

mortal lu'iiii^r, and invests every iiioral
choice with eternal significance. It does
not soothe with unfounded hojies. It urges
to immediate and decided action. On the
other hand, it agrees Avith the evolutional
or educational theory of the sermon hy
recognizing that the Incarnation was a
historical crisis, that the Resurrection was
a historical victory, and that the ]\Iediato-
rial Reign of Jesus Christ is a historical
process. The present life of man is to l)e
sanctified and sweetened, and the whole
earth is to be made the abode of piety and
peace. That eternal issues are involved
in the process, no thoughtful man, who
reverently reads his Bible, can for a mo-
ment doubt, and must be assumed on the
ground of the soul's indestructible being
and the absolute authority of moral law ;
nor can these considerations be eliminated
from the message which (lie pidpit must
deliver ; but the immediate olgect of attain-
ment nuist ])e the present conversion of men
to holiness of life, byfaiili in Jesus Christ.
This will give living unity to the sermon,
and cannot fail to imj)ress the preacher
A\ilh a i)rofound conviction of the historical
necessity and importance of his vocation.

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN
PREACHING.

" Know thyself," was the short, pithy
sentence into which the best Greek thought
compressed its practical wisdom. This
constitutes the problem of a sound philoso-
phy, and it is indispensable to genuine
oratorical power. For it is not the word
which holds the subtle, conquering energy,
but the thought which the word aims to
carry, and thought comes with its mightiest
force only when the soul is stirred to its
profoundest depths, is roused in the com-
pass of all its powers, and thrusts itself
forward with eager and hastening step.
Language is only the vehicle of thought,
and thought is the mind in conscious ac-
tion. If words are to burn their way,
thought must be at white heat, and the
soul must be on fire. We preach to per-
suade men, and the secret of persuasion is

57

58 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHIXG.

the impact of soul upon soul, in which
obscurity is (nercome by clearness, and
doubt by faith, and narrowness by breadth,
and fancies by facts, and partiality by com-
prehension, and hesitation by decision.
As a rule, audiences are more responsive
tJian sympathetic. Often thc}^ are cold
and critical, if not positively hostile.
When at their best, they wait to be moved,
and they can be powerfully and perma-
nently moved only by words that convey
strong personal conviction, and provoke
an instant affirmative response. Whether
we like it or not, whether we justify the
attitude, or condemn it, the hearer need
not be expected to surrender in advance.
Preaching is always an athletic contest, a
close grappling and serious wrestle, and
whether the result shall be conquest, or
defeat, or a drawn battle, will depend upon
the perfect command the preacher has of
his thoughts and of himself. The sword
must grow to his hands, must be double-
edged, and he must be master in its use.
The soul in you nuist make the souls of
your hearers captive. You must speak
with authority ; not the authority of self-
conceit, nor that of paraded learning, nor

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 59

that of ecclesiastical decisions, but the
authority which accompanies personal cer-
titude.

This is the only personal element which
has any legitimate place in the theory
of preaching, and without it preaching is
emptied of its persuasive power. All else
is subsidiary and incidental, peculiar to the
individual, whether the peculiarity be physi-
cal, or mental, or rhetorical. Individuality
and personality are not equivalents in mean-
ing. The individual is the limited, the par-
tial, the changing; the personal is the
essential, the inclusive, the permanent. It
is the fixed, intelligent certitude of soul,
rooted in that knowledge of self which is
the outcome of a personal testing of Divine
truth, which constitutes the unfailing and
inexhaustible source of moral power in the
preacher. The Gospel must be in him, a
well of water springing into everlasting
life, untouched by drought or frost, refresh-
ing his own spirit, and quenching the thirst
of others. If any of you entertain the
notion that anything can be a substitute for
this, a ministry of ten years will strip you
of the illusion.

I want to make a tlii'eefold application

60 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

of this principle : first, to the physical con-
dition of the preaelier ; then, to his devo-
tional temper • and finall}^ to his rhetorical
cultnre.

Onr age is an age of physical culture.
Tlie gymnasium crowds hard upon the
lecture-room. ]\Iuscle enters into competi-
tion with scholarship in our lialls of learn-
ing. Within certain limits tlie tendency
is a sound and liealthy one. For the in-
telligent care of the body is a religious
duty ; and conscientiousness is sadly de-
ficient when it permits the habitual dis-
regard of hygienic laws. Sickliness is not
an evidence of saintliness; a pale face is
not prima facie evidence of power ; and a
sturdy, vigorous frame is not the sign of
animalism. But there is need of remem-
bering that the l)ody is not the measure of
the soul, that insignificance and weakness
may liide a giant frame, and exceptional
force may dwell in a frail body. This
needs no proof. You will recall Reniard
and Calvin and Kant and Paul. We have
all seen men of imposing presence, for
whom our reverence vanished as soon as
lliey (i]tened their lips: while others bound
us tn tliciii as by links of steel, whose [tlivs-

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 61

ical insignificance provoked onr laughter
or compassion. Even the ancient proverb
of a sound mind in a sound body needs
serious qualification ; for history abounds
in instances of men whose mental sanity
and moral power have suffered no appre-
ciable hindrance from constitutional and
physical infirmities. There is danger here,
as everywhere else, of hasty generalization,
from a partial induction of facts. The
truth is more nearly this, that thorough-
going rectitude involves reverence for all
law, physical or moral, human or Divine.
There is a sense in which all law is moral
and Divine, universally and eternally obli-
gatory, ignorance of which is blamable, and
violation of which is sin. It is your busi-
ness to understand your body, as much as
it is your business to understand your soul.
It is as much your duty to watch over and
care for your body, as it is to save your
soul. Christ came to redeem them both,
and you may not do less than fall into line
with Him.

Here I place the emphasis, upon an intel-
ligent, conscientious, reverent care of the
body, not upon its native vigor, least of
all upon the magnitude of its proportions.

62 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

You are not responsible for either height
or weight. You cannot add to your stat-
ure. You cannot change the color of your
eyes or hair. And some of you will have
a perpetual contest with inherited and con-
stitutional infirmities. There is one thing
you can do, are morally bound to do, have
an intelligent care for the body which is
yours. You can put your personal integ-
rity into your mortal flesh. You can pay
the debt which, under God, you owe to
brain, and lungs, and stomach. You can
eat, drink, and sleep, to the glory of God.
Don't discount these bills. Pay them
promptly, gladly ; and pay a hundred
cents on a dollar. You will not understand
me to advocate self-indulgence ; but sucli
an intelligent oversiglit as the owner of
horses would give to the animals in his sta-
bles. It is the moral element in physical
culture which is of universal obligation ;
and it is here that the principle applies that
he only who is faithful in the least can be
faitliful in the highest. Conscientiousness
admits of no exceptions. Financial honesty
is a matter of pennies. Veracity does not
permit lying in little things. Art does not
disdain exactness in trifles. .Viid it is, in

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 63

the very nature of things, impossible for a
man to treat his body with systematic neg-
ligence or disregard, without suffering in
mental sanity and moral power. The whole
history of asceticism proves this. Fastings,
and vigils, and flagellations unhinged the
mind, filling it with vagaries and dreams,
sapping its normal strength, and undermin-
ing its moral power. The personal integ-
rity, therefore, the stern and habitual fidel-
ity to self, which is the secret of moral
energy, must extend its sovereignty over
the province of the body, and guard it
from needless waste.

What I have said about the care of the
body is also true of style, and of all those
minor proprieties which have to do with the
conduct of public worship. Genuineness
and simple heartiness are the charm of all
speech, the beauty of all services. The
Christian preacher should be a gentleman ;
that is, a man who is moved by a genuine
respect for all that is, and who is so true
that he cannot treat sacred things with
levity, nor conduct the worship of God in
a slovenly manner. Many years ago, in
my church, I had a blunt old Irishman.
He was a diamond in the rouo-h. He was

64 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

very poor, but not a beggar. He was un-
educated, l)ut lie knew his Bible. lie was
without polish, ignorant of social etiquette,
but he was the soul of courtesy and polite-
ness, unassuming and catholic. He told
me once that lie always put on liis coat be-
fore he conducted family prayers. It was
a little tiling, but it meant a great deal. I
do not suppose that it would have been a
sin for him to pray in his shirt sleeves; but
he felt that God was entitled to the same
forms of respectful a[)proacli which he
would have scrupulously observed in call-
ing upon his friends. He was simply true
to the inherent fitness of things, and that
is the soul of courtesy and refinement.

Hence even the personal habits and dress
of the minister are worthy of his attention.
He has no business to be slovenly and vul-
gar. I recently listened to two distinguished
scholars who occupy important chairs in
the University of Berlin. One appeared
in rusty garments and soiled linen, while
he di'oned away in a lifeless fashion for
nearly an hour. The sight roused in me
an instinctive resentment. I felt that his
ap])earance was an insult to his beard's,
and that it betokened a want of self-respect,

THE rERSONAL ELEMENT. 65

however far these things may have been
present to his conscions thought. They
ought to have been present to him. There
is an everhisting incongruity between great
learning and dirty coUars. The other man
held an equally high rank in scholarship,
but he Avas dressed in faultless taste. His
neck was clean, his linen was immaculate.
His beard was closely cropped and care-
fully brushed, his coat was closely buttoned.
He was "a gentleman and a scholar."
There was nothing foppish aliout him ; he
was simply a clean, wholesome man, who
had a keen perception of the fitness of
things. It was a pleasure to look at him,
and he spoke as he looked, with freedom,
exactness, and fiery animation.

Now, there is an artificial cultivation of
manners. It infects the tone, the attitude,
the dress. The elocution becomes pom-
pous. The dress becomes prescribed and
official. Mannerism is the worst of man-
ners. When primary or undue attention
is given to the form, the life suffers and
shrivels. And yet, to be perfectly natu-
ral, observing always that outward deco-
rum which befits the occasion, demands the
severest and most unremitting self-disci-

66 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

pline. It requires the culture of the heart,
until the spirit in you obtains such clear-
ness of vision, such intensity of grasp, such
an intuitive perception of what the occa-
sion requires, such a fixed purpose to meet
every emergency as it arises, that the pro-
prieties will almost take care of themselves,
as fragrance radiates from the rose and light
from the sun. Keep the central fires burn-
ing. I know that my remed}- is a severe
and searching one, and I confess that it is
easier to preach than to practise ; but I
confidently appeal to you whether I am
not right. It is in the conduct of worship,
as with godliness ; you can have the form
without the power, but you cannot have
the power without its appropriate form,
and where the power is perfect the form
will be perfect. All beauty comes from
life, and all vigorous life builds in lines of
beauty.

There is, probably, no part of public
worship and of pastoral duty which is so
trying as that of prayer. At the bedside,
at funerals, on the Lord's day, the prayer
is the minister's most arduous service. He
soon discovers that ])re})aration is indis-
pensable, unless a dead and dry formality

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 67

shall be permitted to eat out of him all
elements of fresh and forcible devotion.
But how shall he prepare himself ? Shall
he use regular forms, hallowed by antiquity,
made precious by association, or shall he
write out his prayers, and commit them to
memory? Both methods have been recom-
mended, and we cannot condemn them as
wrong, so long as they give free flow to
spiritual devotion. Much may be gained
from the study of liturgies. The prayers
composed by great and saintly men may
give a deeper tone to our petitions, and a
wider range to our supplicatory speech.
Certainly the psalms cannot safely be neg-
lected, and it may be well sometimes to
make the pen the instrument of devotion,
that golden apples may gleam in a frame-
work of silver. But mechanism must be
avoided. That is the death of devotion,
and they who use written forms need ever-
more to pass them through the fiery cruci-
ble of personal brooding, until they glow
and burn again. You must retreat within
yourself. You must feel the burden of
your own wants, your blindness, your
weakness, your sin. You must make the
sorrows of others your own, and see in the

68 PHILOSOPnY OF PREACHING.

dead face your own mother or babe. Then
the tiniest hands will open the flood-gates
of your sympath}-. You must imj)ersonate
the throng, the aged, the mature, the young,
hearts that are glad, and hearts that are
crushed ; men and women who are unmur-
muring and patient, and others who are
hard and rebellious; and then, with the
vision of an omniscient and loving Father
mastering your own soul, you will pray.
It is a task from which we shrink ; it in-
volves a long retreat and a wide disper-
sion, a falling back upon the living centre
of })ersonal life, whence alone sympathy
radiates into the universal and Divine ;
but when you have accom})lished the ardu-
ous task, and the full stream of human want
courses through your spirit, the coal of fire
will lie upon your lips. Let us hear once
more the words of the Master : "When
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and
when thoii hast shut thy door, pray to thy
Father which is in secret." That is the
law of all prayer. Every man finds God
where Augustine foiuid him — within him-
self. Retreat then within yourself, and
your prayer will bring the lieavens near.
The secret of devotion is tlic secret of a

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 69

forcible style. There is a higher teacher
than text-books on rhetoric and logic. You
do well to master these, but if you let them
master you, your most careful composition
will lack the intensest vitality. You must
liave your own style and logic. And by
that I do not mean such petty idiosyncra-
sies as some men assiduously cultivate,
mistaking singularity for originality, but
simple and thorough-going harmony be-
tAveen your thought and its form. Do not
overlay it with factitious adornment. Too
many jewels are offensive. Preach as you
would talk to a friend on the theme of
which you are full. Elevated thought will
weave its own royal robes. Strong thought
will always flash out in terse phrases.
There is a mechanical and a vital use of
language. It becomes a mechanical instru-
ment when the primary attention is fixed
upon words and phrases ; and then it is no
more than sounding brass and a tinkling
cymbal. It l^ecomes a vital organ when
the only care is that the thought shall have
clear and pungent expression, and then it
speeds to its mark like a bullet from a
Minie-rifle. That which you elaborate
within the inmost centre, and is then

70 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

clothed in tlio language wliidi meanwhile
has taken shape, Avill be remembered by
you both in substance and form with the
greatest ease, and will ])e uttered b)' you
with all the energy of natural fervor. The
failure of severely and systematically doing
this explains, in my judgment, more than
anything else, the dil'Hculty which so many
ministei's experience in speaking without
the use of manuscript. The sermon is
thought out during the process of composi-
tion. It should have been tliought out be-
fore a line was written. There is too wide
a chasm between the thought and the lan-
guage. The manuscript is too mechanical
a product ; it is not the free and natural
utterance of the burning tliought. The
style is full of strain and labor, and, if the
sermon so composed should be committed
to memory, and then preached, everybody
would detect the incongruity. Such ser-
pions must be read, for a free style cannot be
elaborate. You must preach as you think,
and as you \\ (tuld speak, when your thought
is at white heat. There are manuscri^jt
sermons which are composed in that way,
under tlie rush of a kindled intelligence,
and with the whole order of tliought clearly

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 71

grasped in advance, and should such man-
uscripts be mislaid, the preacher would find
but little trouble in reproducing the whole
in free speech. The rule is a universal one,
that he who is master of himself, whose
thought assumes the form of profound,
personal conviction, will find it compara-
tively easy to cultivate a clear and forcible
utterance, and will escape the slavery
which compels some men to clutch their
paper as if in conscious danger of momen-
tary shipwreck.

I think you will agree with me that the
various recommendations given in treatises
on homiletics, bearing on the personal ele-
ment in preaching, may be reduced to this
one : the clearness and certitude of self-
knowledge. There must be no haziness.
There must be no doubt. And then there
is required the simple courage which is
content to let the inner man have his way.
In a word, be yourseljp. That is the easiest
said and the hardest done. The real man
in us all is overlaid with artificialities and
traditionalisms, whose wrappings cling to
us and hinder free movement, as did the
bandages which fettered the risen Lazarus.
It requires bravery, energy, and time to

72 PniLOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

tear them away. If witliin twenty years
you have succeeded in becoming yourself,
in clearly grasping your real thought, and
clothing it in the forms of natui-al speech,
you have done a great work. The ministry
of pure law is always one of condemnation.
The attempt to cultivate an external con-
formity to its precepts, keeps us forever in
bondage. It is only when law l)ecomes life,
when the spirit itself is roused from its
lethargy and comes into conscious posses-
sion of its indefeasible lieritage, that the
reign of lil)erty begins. Then the rules
learned by rote, and received upon author-
ity, enact themselves, and thought runs
along the prescribed lines withort friction.
Logic, it has well been said, does not teach
us how we ought to thiidc, but how we
do think. Its function is not legislative,
but descriptive. Rhetoric does not teach
us how we ought to speak, but how we do
speak when we liave something to sa}-.
Its function is not legislative, but descrij>
tive. No man has mastered either logic or
rhetoric until he has mastered himself; for
logic only interprets the processes of clear
thinking, and rhetoric is only the science
of clear expression.

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 73

So then " Knotv Thyself' is the preacher's
simple and comprehensive canon. And its
simplicity constitutes its severity. It com-
pels you to be a philosopher. It summons
you to severe and incessant introspection.
It forces you back upon the primitive de-
liverances of consciousness. It compels
you to sift these, until only the purest
wheat remains. Psychology and ethics are
the handmaids of oratory. No preacher
can afford to neglect these studies, not
merely because they are the instruments of
the severest mental chscipline, but because
they force him to understand himself, and
to find Avithin his own nature the eternal
basis of certitude. Frederick W. Robert-
son read Plato and Aristotle for mental
inspiration and equipment. This may seem
a very severe diet, but roast beef makes
blood and is better than ice cream and
cake. The earnest attempt to find out
what Kant is after in the Critique of Pure
Reason, and the intelligent comparison of
his assumptions and conclusions with the
unvarnished testimony of your own con-
sciousness, will help you more in preach-
ing, than devouring a whole library of
modern literature. We read too much, we

<4 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHINGS

tliink too little. The first is eas}-, the
second is hard. You may say that meta-
ph^^sics are dull and make your head ache.
That is inevitable ; for if you want the best,
you must jjay the price. You complain
that philosophy leads to nothing practical.
It brings you face to face with yourself,
and notliing is more supremely practical
than that. Y^)u rei)ly that the results are
meagre at the best, and that tliey are often
contradictory, if not incomprehensible and
absurd. But bulk is not the measure of
value, and he Avho seeks to know himself,
digs in the deepest mines where the choic-
est treasures are stored. Y^'ou insist that
it is the preacher's business to know his
Bil)le, and to interpret the mind of (xod ;
but it is in the primary and necessary deliv-
erances of your i-ational and moral nature
that the conviction of God's existence
forces itself upon you ; you can under-
stand your Bible only in personal experi-
ence of its redemptive revelation ; and you
can know in certainty the mind of God
only as that has mastered your own reason
by its inherent rationality. WIiiyi_yoii
transcend the bounds of pei-sonal conyic■^
tion, 3'our speech is cniply and impotent...

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 75

You tell me that the preacher should be a
student of human nature. It is a favorite
phrase, and it is often said that ministers
do not know men. So far as there is any
truth in the charge, it is because the
preacher does not know himself. The
man in him has become a bandaged and
dried-up mummy, and the remedy is in
setting his own manhood at liberty. The
knowledge of others comes primarily by
the knowledge of self. Find out what you
are ; catalogue your own fears and hopes ;
survey the field of your own moral conflict ;
note carefully the force which any state-
ment makes upon your own mind and
heart ; analyze the secret of that authority
before which you lie prostrate in the dust;
and you will know every other man. All
men are like yourself ; and in the clear
study of that bit of human nature which
you have and are, you will reach the sci-
ence of humanity in its essential life.
There need be no timidity here ; utter
yourself, and your words will command
universal attention and acceptance.

It is equally clear that such a method
imposes its restrictions. It is often said
that we must have a theology which can

76 PHILOSOPHY OF P BEACHING.

be preached. This is only another way of
sapng that theology has for us its neces-
sar}' limitations, and that tliese limitations
grow out of the relation between the
preacher and his hearers. They must be
pei-suaded, and to persuade them he must
fu-st himself be persuaded. He must speak
of his own knowledge. The force of his
ap23eal lies in the energy of his personal
conviction. He is pre-eminently and ex-
clusively a ^vitness. He must be a seer.
He must be rigid with himself in excluding
speculation from his 2)ul)lic utterances,
courageously confessing ignorance where
ignorance describes his real mental attitude.
He must be bravely true to liimself, and
speak only that of which he is firmly
convinced. It behooves liim to master his
own doulits firet, before he thrusts them
upon others. He must tear down only
when he is fully prepared to build up. Do
not feed your people on green apples.
Wait until they are ripe. From the fierce
and fiery conflict with doubt, no thouglitful
man can be exempt. There will come days
and weeks when the midnight and tempest
are upon your soul, when you cry beneath
heavens of brass. But even then you will

THE PERSOXAL ELEMENT. 11

feel that you need a God, that the soul
hungers after righteousness ; that truth
and holiness are priceless and binding,
even if death ends all. Preach these thing's
amid the enveloping blackness ; be true to
yourself even then, and your ministry will
not be in vain. By and by the old faith
will come back. You will not drift away
from your mother's knees, where you first
learned to pray; you will not lose the
radiant vision of your Lord. Your path
may lie through thick and tangled forests
and over rocky steeps, but you will stand
at last upon the lofty table-lands, kissed
by the rays of an eternal noon. Remem-
ber, I pray you, the words of your Lord
and mine : "if mi^/ man tvills to do Crod's
will, he shall know of the doctrine.''^

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT IN
PKEACHING.

I AM aware that the wording of my
theme is calculated to arouse suspicion and
distrust. For it is the fashion in some
quarters to denounce ethical preaching,
and the preaching of ethics. We are all
warned that such a procedure is the open
door into naturalism and rationalism. Ev-
erything here depends upon our definitions.
If by naturalism we understand that tem-
per and system of thouglit which excludes
the supernatural and makes every man his
own and only redeemer, then the preaching
which starts witli, and incessantly appeals
to, the ethical testimony of human nature,
riddles the naturalistic pliilosophy and
leaves it without a line of defence. Bush-
nell was riglit when he made the soul of
man the major premise in his argument for
the supernatural. And that this was Paul's
78

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 79

method is clear from the single statement
in which he gives us the method of his min-
istry, that lie sought to commend himself
to every man's conscience as in the sight
of God. He made little use of external
evidence. He did not trouble himself
about the canon. He appealed to ])ut one
miracle, the miracle of our Lord's resurrec-
tion from the dead ; and that was verified
to him not solely by historical testimony,
but by personal experience of the power
of the risen Christ. He let his own soul
speak, and the argument went straight
home. No preaching ever was more natu-
ral, though it was supernatural in every
fibre. The philosophy which eliminates the
supernatural is hopelessly shattered in the
court of every man's conscience. The
denial of the living God involves discredit
of the moral nature, whose ingrained sense
of guilt and consciousness of weakness
demand a pardoning and redeeming God.
Hence, Tertullian speaks of the soul's tes-
timony as naturally Christian; and Augus-
tine describes the heart of man as restless
until it found its rest in God. If our
preaching is to be vital, and not mechanical,
it must be fearlessly natural, grounded in

80 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

the conviction that the scheme of redemp-
tion is perfectly adapted to the needs of
man, and fitted to evoke his intelligent and
cordial response.

And what is meant by rationalism ? He
who takes the ground that the unaided
reason of man is competent to fatliom the
depths of his own being, to explain the
riddle of his own existence, to solve the
problem of his own moral contradiction
and unrest, cannot even convert himself
to his creed, much less disciple others. Be
it so, that we are only children, " crying
in the night, and with no language but a
cry," the cry is there ; and in that crv,
which nothing can stifle, the reason in man
leaps over the boundaries of inductive logic.
It falls back upon its primitive constitution
as demanding a higher and an infallible
tuition. "We believe the Gospel, with its
revelation of the impartial and infinite
love of God, its assurance of free forgive-
ness, its promise of Divine help, and its
disclosure of the life everlasting, to be an
answer to that cry, breathing peace, coui-
age, and undying liope into human hearts ;
and that iiinkcs it supremely latioiial. Here
again we may Icai-ii hum Paul. I lis autlior-

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 81

ity was frequently challenged. The high-
church X3arty of his day claimed that he
was not an apostle, because he had never
been a personal disciple of Christ; and the
eleven had (hstinctly decided, when they
proceeded to fill the vacancy created by
the apostasy and suicide of Judas, that the
lapsed bishopric could be held only by a
man who belonged to the ranks of those
who, from the baptism of John to the
ascension, liad followed Christ. They cast
their lots, and solemnly ordained Matthias
by the laying on of hands. We hear
nothing more of him. He had the title ;
but the energy descended upon Saul of
Tarsus, a man who never received apostolic
ordination, though he did secure apostolic
recognition at the Council of Jerusalem.
Upon Avhat did he base his claim to be
regarded as the peer of James, John, and
Peter, the pillars of the infant church?
He declared that he, too, had seen the
Lord. The miracles of an apostle had
been wrought by him, and he could appeal
to these as the credentials of his Divine
commission. But he laid the primary
emphasis upon the results of his preach-
ing. He was of insignificant stature and

8'J PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

lacked many of the graces of oratory ; but
he could say that he had been mighty
through God in pulling down strongholcLs,
in casting down imaginations and every
hiofh tiling' wliich exalted itself against the
knowledge of God, Ijringing into captivity
every thought to the obedience of Christ.
That describes his preaching. It was a
mighty intellectual wrestle, before which
every antagonist went down. It was not
the logic of the schools, but it was that
miglitier logic which Sir William Hamil-
ton said Dr. Guthrie possessed, in which
there was but one step between the premise
and the conclusion. There is generally
the most of reason where there is the least
of argument, wdiere the speech compels
every man to listen to the authority within.
Let us not deceive ourselves. The preach-
ing which subdued the Roman and the
Greek, wliich vanquished the sword and
the pen, the preaching of which Paul was
the most eminent and successful represen-
tative, is tlie only preaching which can
master and subdue tlie life of our day. It
must be rational. It must make tlie thought
of man captive. It must make the hearer

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 83

see that fidelity to self compels glad sur-
render to Jesus Christ.

There are some Avho make a distinction
between the intellectual and the moral
nature, between the understanding and
the reason, on the basis of the Kantian
philosophy. It has been a favorite and
familiar thesis that the reason leads us
only a little way, and then hands us over
to the authority of faith. Reason shows
the necessity of revelation and redemption,
and must examine the credentials of a
Divine messenger ; but at that point reason
must submit. It never has submitted, and
it never will submit. It insists that the
message, in all its parts and as an organic
whole, shall be rational, shine in the radi-
ance of self-evident truth. You cannot deal
with the reason and neglect the conscience.
The soul is a living unity, in whose con-
scious life the intellectual and the ethical
elements perpetually blend. You can have
no psychology which does not assume the
veracity of consciousness ; you can have
no true thouglit which does not reverence
each separate fact, and all the facts in their
natural order and in their completeness.
The ethical is the primary and inclusive

84 PHILOSOPHY OF PKEAruiXG.

categoiy of the understanding, and all true
thinking is at heart an etliical process.
Nor, Dn the other hand, can the moi-al
nature act in severance from the intel-
lectual. Every moral deliverance is an
act of judgment, a -consciously rational
verdict. Thus the science of the soul is
an organic, indissoluble unity, where the
intellectual and the ethical elements con-
stantly Ijalance and interpenetrate each
other ; so that we may say that nothing
is rational which is not right, and nothing
is right which is not rational ; Avhile the
relation between God and the soul is such
that nothing can be rational and right for
man which is not also rational and right
for God, and nothing can be divinely ra-
tional and right for God whicli does not
command the soul's prompt and cordial
response. INIen need only to be true to
themselves, to have the truth of God mas-
ter them. This does not make the human
reason the seat of primary authority and
infallible ; but it does affirm the capacity
of the reason in man to discern and verify
the truth of Divine revelation. Otlicrwise,
inspiration itself would l)e impossible and
inconceivable; for in inspired men the

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 85

highest thoughts of God burn and glow in
words and phrases that are full of the fire
of personal rational conviction. And so
the Bible continues to be the greatest of all
books, because it lies nearest to the level
of true human thought. Ethical preach-
ing and the preaching of ethics do not,
therefore, involve a lapse into naturalism
or rationalism, as systems of thought which
exclude the supernatural. They carry us
resistlessly into the supernatural ; nay, the
ethical life moves and has its being in the
supernatural. Man is already in the realm
of the supernatural and needs no railway
of logic to convey him to its edge.

But now, let me say further, that a sharp
distinction must be made between ethical
preaching and the preaching of ethics. The
two are not synonymous. When you change
the adjective into a noun, you radically
change the conception. In the one case
you define a certain quality of the preach-
ing, its pervading and peculiar tone,
without saying anything about its con-
tents. In the other case you trace the
boundaries of the subject matter of preach-
ing. Ethical preaching is something very
different from the preaching of ethics ; at

86 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

least, in clear thinking, the two should not
be confounded. I plead for the first, not
for the second. It is the good news of re-
demption in Jesus Christ which we are to
preach, not a code of theoretic and practi-
cal morals. There are a thousand ques-
tions in casuistry upon wliich the Bible
does not touch, and upon which the preacher
has no right to pronounce judgment. The
Scriptures deal first of all with a succession
of great redemptive acts, culminating in
the Incarnation, Atonement, and Ascen-
sion ; then with fundamental, self-evident,
and universally authoritative principles of
moral life ; and with specific precepts only
as these grow out of principles. The apos-
tle Paul could not take up a collection for
the poor in Jerusalem, without referring
to the unspeakable gift of God in Jesus
Christ. What inen shall eat and drink,
what raiment they shall wear, what houses
they shall live in, what ticket they shall
vote, what amusements and recreations
they shall indulge in, it is not for the
preacher to say. In these matters every
man must stand and fall to his own mas-
ter. The responsibility rests with him, and
him alone, of making personal application

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 87

of the general principles of righteousness.
He may not make a brute of himself ; he
may not ignore the claims of God and of
his fellow-men ; he may not bargain away
the eternities for temporal advantage ; you
may and must summon him to integrity,
honesty, chastity, charity; and the more
you do this, the more impregnable will be
your vantage-ground, the more authorita-
tive will become your speech. But when
you attempt to be a censor of private
morals or a critic of public policy, how-
ever honest your intentions or commend-
able your motives, you will provoke dissent
from every hearer whose good will it is
worth while to retain. For you are to
preach to men, whom you are to urge to
thoughtful, personal independence, whose
character is to be unfolded from the germ
of personal integrity.

Even on the widest definition, the
preacher is vastly more than a lecturer
on ethics. For ethics, as a science, deals
with the elucidation of principles of con-
duct and character on the basis of an in-
ductive psychological analysis, and with
the applications of these principles to pres-
ent earthly relations. It cannot bring to

88 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

view the highest iiKitives to repentance,
such as are found in the h)Ye of God and
the sacrifice of the Cross. It may com-
mand and rebuke, hut it cannot create
anew and comfort. Its message is legal,
not evangelical, and you are summoned to
speak of pardon and purity as made avail-
able for man by the grace of God in Christ
Jesus. But while it is not 3^our vocation
to be a preacher of ethics, the etliical qual-
ity must be regnant in all your preaching,
determining your own personal mental tem-
pei', controlling your interpretation of the
Gospel, and giving detiniteness of aim to
your speech.

The temper of 3'our own mind must be
ethical. Moral rectitude is tlie first canon
which you are to regard in the preparation
of every sermon, in the selection of every
text, in its interpretation, in the unfolding
and application of its doctrine. The sul>
tlest temptations of the preacher are along
the lines of mental and spiritual demagog-
ism. He is tempted to act the politician,
to use unworthy means in order to secure
laudable ends. He is in danger of playing
with himself and with his message. It lias
been said of Chalmers that his most marked

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 89

quality was the white heat of his earnest-
ness. His sentences were long and in-
volved, his logic was circular and kaleido-
scopic ; but the repetition of his thought
only made its transparent and glowing hon-
esty all the more apparent ; and while in
rhetoric and logic the eminent Scotch
preacher may not be your ideal, in the
ethical loyalty of his mind he commands
our admiration and is worthy of our imita-
tion. Here is the primary root of personal
power. It distinguished Knox and Calvin
and Luther and Paul. Nowhere is it more
marked than in the recorded discourses of
our Lord, whose sublimity is in their sim-
plicity, whose authority is in their radical
integrity. We are never weary of insisting
that the j)reacher must be a good man;
that he must live out of the pulpit as he
talks in it, and we do well. But we do not
carry the ethical imperative far enough
when we stop there ; we must extend its
authority over the subtlest, and most secret,
mental and spiritual processes. The ethi-
cal temper of which I speak will prevent a
man from making an unauthorized use of
Scripture language, and will prompt him
to commit his manuscript to the flames, if

90 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

at the eleveiitli liour he discovers that his
interpretation is vicious or even doubtful.
It will guard him against overstatement
and undue emphasis, and make him jealous
to maintain the natural perspective of truth.
I heard a sermon some years since, of Mhich
a friend said to me : " It was excellent, but
the first sentence was not true." The crit-
icism was deserved. The preacher over-
shot the mark, and so threw away his op-
portunity at the outset. The introduction
cannot be too severely simple and trans-
parent. With equal naturalness should the
theme grow out of the text. Infinitely
better is it to do without a text tlian to
twist it to your purpose. That is dis-
honest, and the noisiest argument will be
vitiated by it. Even on the rostrum of
political debate sincerity conquers, and
special pleading digs its own grave ; in the
pulpit, and when you venture to speak in
the name of God, you can command a hear-
ing for your cause only as you establish a
reputation for intellectual sincerity.

It is this demand for ethical uprightness
whicli has swept the Presbyterian churches,
most conservative of all ecclesiastical l)odies,
into the revision controversy. The West-

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 91

minister Confession does not represent the
living pulpit. Its phrases are repudiated ;
the logical order of its doctrines is re-
jected. Men feel that they have haggled
long enough about substance of doctrine,
a phrase which every man interprets to
suit himself. They want a creed to which
they can subscribe without mental reserva-
tions and unworthy subterfuges, and this
great church will renew its youth when it
shall have burst asunder these shackles.
For orthodoxy is right thinking, and when
a creed ceases to represent the sincere con-
victions of those who subscribe to it, the
professed orthodoxy is the rankest kind of
heresy, which neither wealth nor numbers
can save from the contempt to which even
the semblance of chshonesty is doomed.

But the ethical element must not only
give tone to the preacher's habitual mental
temper ; it must determine his theological
method as well. He deals with ethical
verities, with God and the soul, with sin,
law, grace, salvation, and judgment. These
truths are ethical in their content and
import, whatever may l)e the etymological
origin of the words. They must be ethi-
cally interpreted.

92 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACTIIXG.

The doctrine of an inspired Bible, for
instance, in whatever foini it nia}^ be stated,
reposes at last upon the perception of an
ethical fact. Reach it, if yon will, by the
path of authenticity and integrity of the
documents, and thence by appeal to proph-
ecy and miracle, your primary affirmation
is that the writers Avere credible witnesses.
They did not lie, and they could not have
been deceived. That ethical affirmation is
the l)ed-rock upon wliich the elaborate ar-
o-ument is based, and bv which its every
part is sustained. Or take the more usual
method in contemporary dogmatics. You
believe in the Bible because you believe
Jesus Christ; and you l)elieve Him be-
cause you believe in Him. Your confidence
in what He says, is based u[)on yoiu' con-
fidence in His personal integrity. His
moral sanity and sincerity subdue you.
You hardly thiidc of tlie miracles; His
ethical perfection and His spiritual eleva-
tion win your confidence, and make it easy
for you to believe Iliin when He makes the
most startling declarations about Himself
and the future. You believe Him to be
Cxod because you hav(> faith in Him as
man. You believe in eleiiial ictribntion,

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 93

in heaven and hell, because He taught it.
He holds you. To suggest that He ever
lost his mental poise is to you blasphemy.
Thus Christianity rests upon the percep-
tion of an ethical fact which no criticism
has been able to invalidate ; and the more
closely you keep that fact in view, the
more pungent and powerful will your
preaching be. Let me urge you never to
permit any conscious slacking in the ten-
sion of this profound ethical confidence in
your Lord. Christianity is Christ.

The contents of Christian teaching de-
mand a similar treatment. They are rightly
understood, either as separate doctrines or
as an articulated system, only when they
are ethically interpreted. The letter kill-
eth; only the spirit maketh alive, and a
living theology is always in danger of be-
ing strangled by an excessive literalism,
under whose pressure the ethical element
vanishes. If we regard the Gospel in its
widest aspect as the revelation of redemp-
tive action in man's behalf, our construc-
tion of this action in the several forms of
atonement, regeneration, faith, and repent-
ance will depend upon our previous con-
ception of what God is and what man is.

94 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

Grace, as unmerited favor, leads to sov-
ereignty, the infinite freedom of the Divine
nature ; sin, as the transgression of hiw,
implies the existence of definite relatioi>s
between the offender and the judge. Or,
to phrase it differently, the remedial sys-
tem is imbedded in the moral system, and
must be conformed thereto. What that
moral system is, of which the Gospel is the
crowning exposition, will depend upon our
theological and anthropological postulates.
Start with the absolute freedom of God, as
the essential energy lying back of His nat-
ure, determining its contents and expres-
sion, resolving Him into causative will,
and you are forced either into virtual
pantheism, denying the existence and effi-
ciency of second causes, or into a mechani-
cal interpretation of moral government,
where covenants and constitutions play
their mysterious and bewildering parts.
Power ])ecomes the basis of authority, de-
manding blind submission, refusing a dis-
closure of its rational ground. Supralap-
sarianism completely eliminates the ethical
element in the government of the world.
Nor does it obtain its rightful i)lace where
one Divine attribuh- is made central, im-

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 95

posing its limitations upon all the rest, as
in those systems where justice is declared
to be necessary and love optional, where
law is regarded as universal in its opera-
tion, while grace is limited to the elect.
The gravest objection to such a construc-
tion is not that it perplexes and outrages
the human sense of impartial treatment,
but that it surrenders and shatters the
eternal ethical unity of the Divine Being,
introducing conflict and contrachction into
His essential nature. Reverse the order
by making love primary and regnant, re-
ducing justice to a conglomerate of benevo-
lence and wisdom, divesting it of its ideal
and immutable sovereignty, and you are
involved in the same inconsistency and con-
tradiction. Grace reigns through right-
eousness. Holiness and love are coefficients
in all Divine ethical action, whether in
redemption or in judgment. The ethical
unity, or eternal moral perfection, of God,
is vastly more important for biblical theol-
ogy than the unity of His essential Being.
If we turn to man as the subject of Divine
rule, the ethical interpretation of his nat-
ure, relations, and responsibilities again de-
mands sovereign recognition. No doctrine

96 PHILOSOPHY OF PREAfHIXG.

of original sin, nor of imputation, nor of
human inability can stand which presses
figurative phrases into its support, which
leaves unnoticed the numerous qualifying
statements, and which contradicts the nor-
mal testimony of the moral consciousness.
Responsibility and sovei'eign grace receive
equal and balanced emphasis in the Scrip-
tures. No theory of responsibility is bibli-
cal which makes man competent to save
himself. No theory of grace is biblical
Avhich makes man passive in regeneration, ^
supernaturally acted upon without his
knowledge and election, irrespective of the
moral temper of his personal life. Natural
al)ility, fettered by utter moral impotence,
will not cut the Gordian knot. Such ability
is only a phrase, a misnomer, an utterly
illusive possession. Moral law imjjlies some
form or degree of moral ability, however
inadequate and impartial that a1)ilit3' may
be. The bondage of the will is not its
paralysis or extinction. Theie may be only
a despairing cry, like that which escaped
from Paul wlieii he pictured the man in
whom the Divine law liad made its living
authority felt ; but {\\v\v is life in a cry.
I am not ;ittciii[>tiiig to frame a science of

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 97

moral government; I am simply insisting
that in such a science the procedure must
be consistently and thoroughly ethical,
preserving the ethical unity of the Divine
nature, and doing no violence to the ethical
nature of man. Neither responsibility nor
grace may be reduced to a thing of me-
chanics. The Bible does not do that. It
affirms both with equal boldness, with an
utter absence of conscious contradiction ;
and, in its ever-blending homage to the
behests of moral law, and the confession
of moral weakness, in its language of
mingled self-condemnation and appeal for
mercy, the soul of man but repeats and
confirms the speech of inspiration. Augus-
tinianism and Pelagianism, Calvinism and
Arminianism, have yet to meet, by converg-
ing lines, upon a common platform, Avhere
equal justice shall be done to God as moral
sovereign, and to man as his moral subject.
Responsibility involves ethical freedom;
the Divine sovereignty is an ethical energy,
in whose exercise all the moral perfections
combine, and every soul is reached.

The whole of what we call moral law, or
moral government, is included in our doc-
trine of what God is, and what man is.

98 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

There are only two ethical verities, Gocl
and the soul ; all other phrases do but
describe the personal relations between the
two, and these personal relations are deter-
mined by the respective natures of the
beings related. These beings are ethical,
and hence their relations must be ethical.
They are brought face to face, not joined
by intermediary compacts. Moral law and
moral government are not a tertium quid,
having independent existence and author-
ity. Moral law is simpl}^ the expression
of the Divine judgment, and in that judg-
ment His eternal ethical j)ersonality is
voiced; and so moral law is in perfect
correspondence with the ethical nature of
man ; moral government is simply the ethi-
cal energy of God's personal rule. We
are in constant danger of being misled by
the figurative quality of all language.
Our rhetoric gets the best of our logic.
Our imagination plays tricks with our rea-
son. Popular phrases are converted into
philosophy. We sharply rebuke men for
speaking of evolution, natural selection,
and the like, as if these made a creative
and directing intelligence needless. We
reply that a scientific phrase can do nothing,

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 99

that it can only indicate how a thing is
done, that evolntion implies an energy
which evolves, and natural selection an
energy which selects. But we do not take
our own mecUcine. We talk of a moral
system, of Divine covenants and constitu-
tions, as if these were actual things, instead
of being simply human phrases by which
we attempt to define the eternal ethical
relations between God and man. If I may
speak for myself I would say that I can
use all the verbal forms of every school of
Christian theology ; but at a certain point
in my thinking, I cbop them all, and I am
conscious of only two things, — what God
is, and what I am. These are the two fixed
centres in the far-sweeping ellipse of Chris-
tian thought, and from them the whole field
of moral truth must be surveyed. Perhaps
you will be disposed to emphasize a Christo-
centric attitude, as Christ is both the visible
embodiment of God and of man. For prac-
tical purposes there would be no difference
between us; but I need only remind you
that you cannot define the person of Christ
until you have made clear to yourself what
God is, and what man is, to make it plain
that my statement only carries the matter

100 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

a step further Imck, and lays stress upon
the primary, fundamental ethical concep-
tions which dominate tlie whole circle of
theological thought. Every doctrine dis-
closes, in the final analysis, these two ele-
mentary ethical conceptions, and in their
light the doctrines must be interpreted,
whether separately or in their rational com-
pleteness. Along the entire line of Chris-
tian exposition, from the idea of creation
to that of the final judgment, the kernel
of truth has been reached only when its
ethical elements have been clearly appre-
hended and firmly grasped ; and from this
inner centre of mystery the retuni will be
easy to the free use of all the varied
imagery which has been consecrated in
Christian speech.

Now, then, with soul erect and rifle
charged, what shall be your aim? It is
your vocation to beseech men to be recon-
ciled to God, to give joyful credence to the
message of free forgiveness in Christ, and
to take the yoke of obedience to Him upon,
them. But to secure such a response, you
must evoke from them the confession of
personal guilt, and open their eyes to the
glory of the Lord. They must see their

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 101

own sin, and they must see His righteous-
ness. It is an ethical result which you are
seeking to gain, and therefore your appeal
must be to the ethical nature. In popular
phrase, you must train your guns upon the
conscience of the hearer. And what is

conscience ? The best definition of the

word, closely following its etymological,
derivation, which I have ever seen, makes,
it the soul's power of passing judgment,
upon itself, upon its thoughts, motives,
and actions, a universal, pervasive, judicial-
quality of its conscious life. It does not
supply its own law. That makes its appeal
to the reason, and is discerned by the rea-
son, but when once the rational imperative
has been heard, the soul instantly passes
judgment upon itself in view of its con-
formity to the law which the moral reason
has proclaimed. The appeal to the con-
science, therefore, is simply a summons to
the soul to exercise its highest ethical pre-
rogative. It is only indirectly, and medi-
ately, that you can convince any man. He
must convict and convince himself. Hence
illumination is represented as the primary
function of the ministry of the Holy Spirit ;
while spiritual perception, and the moral

102 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

judgment following it, are the acts of tlie
soul under the revelation of the truth.
Personal responsibility requires no argu-
ment. The moral law is in need of no de-
fence. The perfections of (lod are radiant
in their own light. The life and teachings
of Jesus Christ commend themselves to
every honest and earnest hearer. Tliese
great themes are to be handled by you in
the profound conviction tliat their author-
ity cannot be impugned, with an urgency
which will give the hearer no rest until he
passes judgment upon himself, and shapes
his course accordingly. This will not make
your preaching hortatory. It is a good rule
that the exhortation should be brief, with
the force of solid argument behind it. In
its direct form it may often be w4se to omit
it. Leave the truth to do its own work.
Throw the man upon himself. If you have
brought him face to face with God, you
may retire. But to secure that should be
your overmastering passion, so that the
Divine presence may produce self-convic-
tion, confession, penitence, faith. Never
permit yourself to forget that to provoke
men to self-judgment, in the sight of God,
is your vocation, and should be the aim of

THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 103

all your discourse ; and if your preaching-
be directed to this ethical end, its eternal
undertone, majestic and mighty, will be,
" Now is the day of salvation''' summoning
to instant decision and prompt obedience.

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT IX
PREACHING.

You have been taught that the Reforma-
tion of the sixteenth century was distin-
guished by two things : the appeal to Holy
Scripture in the settlement of all questions
of Christian faith and conduct, and the
conception of religion as justihcation by
faith, as constituted and conserved by per-
sonal and spiritual acts, not by priestly and
sacramental offices. These are, respectively,
the formal and the material principles of
Protestant Christianity. Of the two, the
latter is by far the more radical and revo-
lutionary, because the preliminary and pre-
cedent conception of religion becomes,
consciously or unconsciously, a canon of
criticism and interpretation. It gives us,
whether we recognize it or not, an impei'ium
in imjoerio, a Bible within a Bible, a single
sovereign message dominating the Axhole
course, and explaining all the contents, of
104

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 105

Divine revelation. This explains Luther's
attitude towards the epistle by James. It
was to him a letter of straw, because he
could not find in it the Pauline conception
of the Gospel. The judgment was not
based upon a critical sifting of historical evi-
dence, much less was the procedure ration-
alistic, as proceeding from a denial of the
supernatural; it was simply applying his
conception of the Gospel to each separate
document, and determining its relative au-
thority by the comparison. It is a danger-
ous principle in the hands of weak men, and
easily leads into all manner of vagary ; for
it is not so much an intellectual judgment,
as it is a spiritual intuition, through the ex-
perimental mastery which comes only by
moral conflict, of that single message which
constitutes the vital substance and form of
the Bible. If Luther knew anything, he
knew what it was to be justified by faith in
Jesus Christ ; and this made him alike inde-
pendent of ecclesiastical tradition, and of a
slavish interpretation of the mere letter.
A nominal apostle had for him no more
authority than the decree of a Pope.

After him and with the decadence of
earnest spiritual life, the point of emphasis

106 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

shifted from the material to the formal
principle, from the Gospel itself to the
liible wliich contains it in Avritten form.
Justification by faith became itself only
a dogma, while the main contention con-
cerned the authority of the Scriptures, and
the ground upon which that authority re-
posed. Against the infallibility of councils
and Popes was set the literal infallibility of
Scripture, involving the theory of mechan-
ical and verbal inspiration, which thence-
forward assumed the primary place in
Cluistian dogmatics. It was an unfortu-
nate and mischievous change of base. It
exposed Protestant Christianity to a double
assault. Rome replied that the Church
existed before the New Testament, and had
always been the custodian of the sacred
books, whose authenticity and integrity
assumed the veracity of this traditional
testimony, as the autograph manuscripts
had long since disappeared ; wliile Biblical
criticism pointed out that the Hebrew
vowels were the addition of latter copyists,
that tlie extant manuscripts varied widely
in tlieir textual reading, and in the books
M hich they contained, tluit the Septuagint
differed from the received Hebrew text,

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 107

especially in its cliroiiology, and that many
of the books of the Old Testament, with
the synoptic Gospels, and the epistle to the
Hebrews, were either of anonymous author-
sliip, or uncertain in date of composition,
or composite in literary structure. The
history of dogmatic thought, for the last
two hundred and fifty years, has been
largely an attempt to evade the force of
these objections, either by reconciling the
theory with the facts, or by endeavoring
to withdraw from a position which has
come to be regarded as untenable.

A clear and consistent doctrine of Scrip-
ture is something which Protestantism has
not yet formulated, and which is still in
process of constant revision, no version com-
manding general and hearty assent ; and
many have taken refuge in the practical use
of the Bible, without inquiring into the nat-
ure of inspiration, or the scope of that au-
thority which inspiration guarantees. Such
an agnostic position cannot long be main-
tained, and must act as a perpetual check
upon ardent souls, who insist upon certainty
as indispensable to mental poise and moral
enthusiasm. There can be no biblical
preaching which does not seize the inde-

108 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

structible element of Scripture, the one
message wliicli dominates its entire and
intricate framework, which is independent
of lower and higher criticism alike, and
whose authority is inseparable from its
proclamation. And in thus passing from
the letter to the quickening spirit, from
a collection of pamphlets to the Gospel
which they contain, we are simply going-
back to Luther, to Paul, and to Christ
Himself. This is only another way of say-
ing that the Bible is an organism, a vital
unity, and not a collection of diKJecta mem-
bra., and that therefore it must be under-
stood as a whole, before there can be any
profitable study of its component parts.
Lower criticism may content itself with a
comparison of manuscripts, the edition of
the text, and with grammatical interpreta-
tion ; higher criticism may advance to the
more intricate questions of date, author-
ship, and internal structure ; but the preach-
er meanwhile must be doing his work. He
cannot wait for the last word from Tre-
gelles or Tischendorf, nor for the latest
theory propounded at Tiibingen or Berlin ;
he must deal with the constant factor
which all these researches assume ; he must

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 109

give voice to that Living Word, whose re-
ality and power are independent of human
scholarship. He cannot be indifferent to
what is going on in the universities ; he
ought to keep himself fully abreast of the
intellectual life of his time ; but the fierce
debate should be mainly helpful to him in
clarifying his thscernment of what is pri-
mary and essential, and of what is secondary
and of subordinate importance. The net
result of Christian scholarship will be a
simple Gospel, whose transcendent and
transfiguring message glows undimmed
and uninjured in the fiercest crucible, and
wins the joyful assent of every earnest
heart.

I find myself in hearty agreement with
a living writer, when he says that " many
points which now occupy the attention of
biblical scholars, and call forth learned
dissertations and elaborate treatises, are
not Avorthy of the attention given them ;
and their labors will be regarded as the crit-
ical tithing of the mint, anise, and cumin."
Some of you may live to see the day when
the critical acumen of the nineteenth
century will be regarded as a waste of
intellectual energy, as we now label the

110 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

scholastic ingenuity of the Middle Ages,
and the Gnostic speculations of the earlier
centuries, wlien men will wonder that the
simplicity of the preacher's task, in the
use of the Bible, should ever have been
mistaken. The pulpit is not the place for
raising questions to which an authoritative
answer cannot be given. Its power is
in dealing- with the universal and self-
evidencing element in Holy Scripture, with
a firm reliance that this vital message will
come home in the power and demonstration
of the Holy Ghost.

I am aware that this conception of the
biblical element in preaching contravenes
the traditional use of the Scriptures. We
are never weary of asserting that every
Christian ought to read his Bible, that
preaching should be pervasively biblical,
and that Christian theology, in its separate
doctrines, and in their logical order, should
issue from a careful study of the holy
oracles. I can subscribe to all that. We
agree in maintaining the plenary religious
authority of the Bible. It is the preacher's
text-book, as it is every disciple's manual.
But what am I to read my Bible for ? Am
I to make no discrimination in its literarv

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. Ill

contents ; am I to place all its histories,
and miracles, and legislation npon the same
level, and insist that everything recorded
within its covers is of equally binding
authority upon faith and conduct? Was
not this the blunder of the early Puritans,
who found in the enactments of the Jewish
theocracy the fundamental law for civil
government, and who therefore believed
in the forcible suppression of heresy?
They were true to their logic, but the
major premise of their reasoning was vi-
cious, because it assumed that all legislation
was equally authoritative, unless it had
been specifically revoked at a subsequent
time. Are we to be debarred from follow-
ing the principle of spiritual discrimina-
tion, which is so marked in our Lord's
teaching, and whose bold use distinguishes
the apostle to the Gentiles ? Is there not
need that we should heed those sharp
words of rebuke which our Lord uttered
in the synagogue at Capernaum, " It is the
spirit which quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth
nothing; the words which I have spoken
unto you, they are spirit, and they are
life " ? There is a literalism which dis-
honors the Bible, because it strangles its

112 nilLOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

life, and silences its sublime testimon)^
It discovers meanings in names and num-
bers which they were never intended to
suggest. It finds types of Christ in every-
thing, with interpretations and applications
as fanciful as anything ever perpetrated by
the allejrorical school of Alexandria. It
converts the Bible into a storehouse of
texts, without any regard to the linguistic
peculiarities of the writer, the people wluun
he addressed, and the end which he had
in view. The concordance of Cruden is
made the commentary of Scripture, and
an insane man becomes the interpreter of
an inspired volume. Balaam's words are
invested with the same authority as those
of Moses and Isaiah ; and Caiaphas becomes
as truly inspired as Paul and John. No
distinction is made between good men and
bad men, and even the words of the devil
are quoted as inspired. Should you ever
have occasion to preach from the fourth
verse of the second chapter of Job, where
we read, " Skin for skin : yea, all that a
man hath, will he give for his life," I advise
you to begin your sermon with the sen-
tence, " That is a lie " / The devil is
represented as saying that ; and the book

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 113

of Job proves that he lied when he said it.
The statement is unqualifiedly false. Men
will die for their honor, for their country,
for God and truth.

You may think that I have selected an
extreme illustration, and that there is a
touch of sensationalism in my language,
but my purpose is simply to remind you
that the words and the sentences of the
Bible are not, without further discrimina-
tion, tlie Word of God which you and I
are to preach. If you quote Eliphaz, the
Temanite, or Bildad, the Shuhite, I shall
feel at liberty to criticise their ambitious
theodicies, and under the shield of God's
own emphatic repudiation, both in the book
of Job and elsewhere, I shall not shrink
from labelling their logic as partial, and
their rhetoric as bombastic. And I should
do this, because I am jealous of the Word
of God, because I love it with a holy passion,
and insist therefore that the real message
shall not be inthscriminately confounded
with the literary forms under which it has
been recorded and preserved.

The time has forever gone by when the
human element in the composition of the
Scriptures can be ignored, or regarded as

114 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

incidental. The}- can be fnlly understood
only in so far as we are able to reproduce
the actual environment of their writers,
and make due allowance for the peculiar
phraseology in which they uttered their
thoughts. They used the language and
the formal logic of their times, and the
oldest times of the great book are those of
the imaginative Orient, of the beginnings
of history, of primitive tradition in poetic
and pictorial form. Hence the New Testa-
ment comes more closely home to us than
the Old. The gospels and epistles are
written in a language essentially modern,
vn\\\ a modern atmosphere and outlook.
The Sermon on the ]\I()iuit and the epistles
of Paul fall in with our habits of thought

o

and our use of speech. The farther back
we go, the more pictorial becomes the lan-
guage, until it becomes difficult to disen-
tangle the historical from tlie ideal in the
recorded tradition or narrative.

Nor is the human element confined to
the plu-aseology. The theory that the
^vl■iters of Sci'i})turc were qualified for their
work by the gift of supernatural informa-
tion is, at least in its unqualified form, an
utterly gratuitous assumption. Luke, at

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 115

least, has told us how lie went to work in
preparing to write the gospel which bears
his name, and the Acts of the Apostles.
These books have generally been regarded
as entitled to a place in the New Testa-
ment canon, on the assumption that Luke
Avas the companion of an inspired apostle.
But there is no evidence that Paul had
anything to do with Luke's literary labors,
or that he read Luke's manuscripts before
they were sent to Theophilus. Luke wrote
for a personal friend, and in the introduc-
tion to the first part of the story, which
outlines the life of Christ, he referred to
the sources of his information, and to the
care which he had taken to collate, com-
pare, and critically sift them. From all
that appears, Luke acted the part simply of
an earnest, patient, historical student, claim-
ing no supernatural illumination, and never
dreaming that his private letters would
become universally recognized authorities.
Does this simple explanation deprive these
letters of their authority? Not in the
least ; but, on the other hand, their verac-
ity is more firmly established. For while
they only profess to record in some logical
or chronologfical order the thinsfs which

116 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

were surely believetl at the time, the eye-
witnesses and ministers of the word had
been consulted, and the result of the
inquiry was communicated in private let-
ters— a form of literary composition in
which any doubt would have been freely
expressed.

Nor can Luke be regarded as excei^tional
in this matter. If his writings are to be
regarded as trustworthy and authoritative,
the presumption is that the free use and
incorporation of unknown documents and
traditions were freely resorted to in the
compilation of the liistorical })()rtions of
the Bible. A faithful use of tlie royal and
the priestly archives was all that was needed
for the composition of the books of the
Kings and of the Chronicles. Nor can it
be necessary to maintain that the Penta-
teuch, as we have it, was written by Moses,
and that tlie portions j^receding his own
call were su})ernaturally communicated to
him. Even the Mosaic authorsliij) of the
Pentateuch, \\lii(li eau liardly bt' said to
have been seriously assailed, does not com-
pel us to assume that Genesis is anything
more than a carefid c(mipilation of eurrent
traditions, serving as an introduction to the

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 117

real theme of tlie liistoiy. The emphasis
is on the establishment of the Jewish com-
momvealth, under the law given at Sinai,
and not on the length of the creative days,
or on the nature of the forbidden fruit, or
on the extent of the deluge, or on the
building of the tower of Babel.

Thus each separate book must be read
in the light of its living, germinant idea
and intention. Nor can we stop here.
When the inductive and analytic process
has been completed, the results must be
compared and co-ordinated in their histor-
ical order, and the main thought which
dominates the whole must be eliminated.
That will be the law, the prophets, and
the Gospel, which you are to preach,
faintly gleaming in the first promise of
the seed who should bruise the serpent's
head, and making radiant the face and
ministry of Jesus Christ.

It has been said with truth that criticism
has not essentially altered the main facts
of Israel's history. It has labelled some
things as legendary and allegorical. But
the Decalogue, the Temple service, the
Psalms, and the Prophets have remained,
as showing the great thoughts, and record-

118 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

ing the profound spiritual experiences,
whicli stirred a multitude of hearts when
paganism was well-nigh universal, and dis-
closing the giDund upon Avhieh tliat sul>-
lime faith reposed. And it may be said,
even more emphatically, that a criticism
which in its extreme form leaves us four
great Pauline epistles, and which confesses
that the belief of the early Christians in
the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ is
incapable of psychological ex[)lanation, has
accomplished nothing to discredit Chris-
tianity, and has only placed in stronger
relief the spiritual energy of that Gospel
which knows only Christ and Ilini cruci-
fied. Thus, with even the most meagre
equipment, pushing the logic of elimina-
tion to its utmost verge, the great verities
of God, and law, and sin, and redemption
by Jesus Christ, remain as the most potent
energies in personal experience and in the
mareli of history. You can trace these
thoughts in their orderly development and
iinal expression in the fragmentary pam-
phlets which make up your Bible. If you
place them in chronological order, the Gos-
pel by the apostle John will crown the
literary structure, and the whole will be

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 119

radiant in the glory of Him who dechared
that He had come to reveal the Father, and
to give His life for the world's redemption.
Here is the vital pulse and the beating
heart of all Scripture, in the revelation of
G-od, in his self-expression, by word and
deed, by law and prophecy, by precept and
promise, in personal experience and his-
tory, in redemption and judgment. You
are to read the Bible to find out what God
has to say about Himself, to discover what
He is, what He thinks of you, and what
He has done for you. Every one of the
autograph manuscripts has been lost —
what of that P There are a hundi-ed thou-
sand variations in the Greek text of the
New Testament alone — tvhat of that ?
The genealogies and the chronology of the
Bible are in hopeles confusion — what of
that? You are reading a human transla-
tion— ivhat of that? Suppose Moses did
not write the major part of the Pentateuch ;
suppose the Levitical legislation to be
largely post-exilian ; suppose the latter
part of Isaiah to be from the pen of an
unknown author, and Daniel to be an
anonymous composition of unknown date ;
suppose Job to be a drama and Jonah an

120 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

allegory ; sup[)ose the greater part of Gen-
esis to be the survival of primitive tradi-
tions in pictorial or poetic form ; suppose
all this, and much more — wliat of that?
It is well to remember the words of Cardi-
nal Baronius, that the Scri[)tures tell us
how to go to heaven, not how the heavens
go. Nor were they given us to tell us how
they came to be that they are, but what
we must do to be saved, and that God, in
His love, sent Jesus Christ to save us.

Is not that Paul's doctrine, when he
declares that the Scrii)tures are able to
make us wise unto salvation, that their
design is instruction in righteousness ?
And did not our Lord declare that " eter-
nal life " was the hidden theme of all
prophecy, a perpetual anticipation of, and
testimony to, that Divine redem})tive pur-
pose which secured historical fullilment
in Himself ? Let us cease, at least in the
pulpit, to discuss the cosmogony of Gen-
esis, the passage of the Red Sea, the
manna in the wilderness, the story of
Balaam and his ass, of Jonah and the
whale, of Joshua and the sun, of demoni-
acal possession, and es[)ecially of the
Gadarene swine, upon which latter narra-

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 121

tive Mr. Huxley discourses at such length
and with so much feeling, as if the fate of
a few thousand pigs had anything to do
with the history of man's redemption.
Are these things the vital, universal mat-
ter of the Scriptures? For mj^self, I be-
lieve in a personal devil and in demoniacal
possession, though I frankly own that I do
not know what to make of Balaam and
Jonah ; but I am not prepared to say that
a man cannot be saved unless he believes
in Satan ; I am satisfied if he believes on
the Lord Jesus Christ. I have heard some
say as they banged the Book that they be-
lieved every word within its covex's. So
do I ; but I insist upon reading my Bible
as that Bible tells me to read it, as the
revelation of God, as giving me a vivid
and glorious disclosure of His character,
and purposes, and redemptive deeds, and
so waking in me patience, faith, hope, love,
and joy. The true use of the Bible is not
that of minute exegesis, nor that of in-
terpretation from the context, nor that
of synthetic exposition of each separate
book, but that of a firm grasp upon its
great fundamental and universally domi-
nant verities, which verities are vital and

122 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

regnant now, and would be, if every coj^y
of the Bible should be destroyed. Do not
misunderstand me. Exegesis cannot be
too exact. Analysis and sjni thesis cannot
be too careful. But Avlien all this has been
done, it still remains for you to co-ordinate
all the results under that which is the su-
preme law of Holy Scripture — the revela-
tion of God in redemption. That is what
I mean by biblical preaching, in which
sin and salvation constitute the perpetual
undertone, the inspiration of all worshij),
the secret of all emotion, the urgency of
every appeal, the fire and the force of all
reasoning.

If this is not the true use of the Bible,
then why is it that the Bible is just such a
book as it is? Surely God could easily
have so shaped events as to have preserved
every autograph manuscript of every book
and psalm in the Bible. In such a case
we should have been saved all perplexing
questions of authorsliip, date, structure, and
the like. Criticism might have been made
forever impossible, or only the employment
of fools. But such is not the Bible which
we have ; nor can I conceive of any other
reason why we do not have such a Bible

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 123

as I have described, than that God never
intended that we shoukl have such an one ;
that He was indifferent as to its literal
preservation ; that just such a Bible as we
have, with its critical difficulties and un-
certainties, was meant to be placed in our
hands and used by us ; and that, therefore,
the critical problems which are paraded
with so much ostentation, and which are
a trial to the faith of so many, are of sub-
ordinate importance, and should not be per-
mitted to disturb us in the slightest degree.
They do not annoy the ignorant man in his
devotions, to whom the Scriptures are a
Divine lamp, filled with beaten oil and
glowing with a celestial flame, lighting uji
for him the path of his pilgrimage through
the gloomy gates of death, to where the
heavens are forever blue and racUant ; and
it is an abuse of scholarship when it is per-
mitted to diminish the intensity, or to inter-
rupt the continuity, of this spiritual and,
Divine fellowship. The refuge of the
preacher is not in ignorance, nor in spe-
cial pleading, nor in suspended judgment,
but in the candid recognition of all doubt-
ful and debatable questions, and in such a
conception and estimate of the Bible that

124 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

he can use it witli ever-increasing facility
and force, with the utmost assurance that
the freest and most thorough scholarly re-
search can only help in the end the cause
of truth, whatever havoc it may make ^\'ith
traditional verdicts and judgments.

I have tried, in this discussion, not to
lose sight of the fact that I have been
asked to lecture on preaching. I have re-
sisted the temptation to make excursions
into the field of dogmatics, and I have re-
frained from an attempt to discuss the burn-
ing questions of modern biblical criticism.
I have simply reminded you that there is
no agreement on the nature of inspiration,
nor on the literary sources which the writers
of the Scriptures used in their work. Not
one of us is indifferent to these inquiries,
but while they are being prosecuted, we
must have a Bible which we can conscien-
tiously use, or else manfully step down and
out.

Of course I speak of reverent and Chris-
tian criticism. I leave wholly out of the
account that school whose philosophical
postulate is a denial of the supernatural,
whose definition of the word " scientific "
involves the impossiljility of miracles, and

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 125

who insist upon accounting for the history
of the Jewish commonwealth and for the
establishment of the Christian C'hurch, as
they would in tracing the events which led
to the establishment of the American Re-
public ; though, even in the latter case, the
supernatural element emerges in the pro-
found religious convictions which drove
the Pilgrims from Scrooby to Ley den, and
from Leyden across the waste of waters to
Plymouth Rock. As Descartes insisted
that absolute doubt involved the existence
of the doubter, defying elimination by any
process of dialectics, so it may be said that
personality is itself the affirmation of the
supernatural, and that even he who denies
the existence of a personal God proves that
the idea of the supernatural is a perfectly
indigenous and familiar form of thought.
It is a waste of time to argue with an athe-
ist or a pantheist. The short method with
such people is the direct appeal to the sense
of personal dependence, and of personal ob-
ligation. The only argument here is that
of self-conviction ; and that can never fail,
for the soul is eternally at war with any
system Avhich eliminates the ethical, and

126 PHlLOHOPllY OF PREACHING.

tlie ethical means a personal and righteous
God.

Nor have I sought for a common ground
with those who reduce Christ to a m3-th,
or who refuse to recognize His prophetic
authority and redeeming energy. There
can be no religion without a personal God,
and there can be no Christianity without
the Lord Jesus Clii'ist. The personal reve-
lation of God in Christ is assumed, not
merely, nor even mainl}-, on the ground
of historic evidence, but on the incontro-
vertible ground of personal experience, in
ever widening circles, and in ever deepen-
ing intensity. The life of the world was
never so full of the personal Christ as it
is to-day. But this revelation of the per-
sonal God in Jesus Christ, which is the
supreme fact and the conquering energy
of our time, is the only thing which I have
postulated, and my contention is that this
is the essential element in that long his-
torj', whose l)roken and fragmentary records
make up the Scriptures. That constitutes
not only the unity of Moses, David, Isaiah,
Paul, and John, but also the unity of the
Bible and of our living Christianity. The
broad and widening stream is thereby seen

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 127

to be one with its original sources, traced
to the origin of man. Therein lies the
value of the Bible, and that must be the
supreme canon of interpretation. God in
Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself,
is its great theme. All other questions,
whether dogmatic or critical, are subor-
dinate, and may be ignored in your voca-
tion as preachers of the Gospel.

I am perfectly aware that all this is not
new to you. You have gone all over tliis
ground in the lecture-room. But the atmos-
phere of the pulpit is not that of the library.
You can read the story of Napoleon's wars,
and study the maps of his campaigns, with-
out palpitation of heart ; but your face
would blanch at the flash of sabres, and
you would dodge the cannon-balls if you
saw them speeding from the guns. To
proclaim upon the housetops what has been
whispered in the ear, requires moral cour-
age. Still, that which gives a relief to
you, you are bound to give to others. You
may not, even by your silence, countenance
a claim for the Bible, which claim every
intelligent hearer knows to have been dis-
credited by Christian scholarship. To do
that will subject you to the charge, either of

128 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

ignorance or of cowardice. You need not,
you should not, make the pulpit the arena
of debate upon questions in dispute ; you
need not, you should not, pose as the ad-
vocate of this or that theory of inspiration,
of this or that school of critical inquiry ;
but you can, and you ought to, use your
Bible as the record of the revelation of
God to men, and give men phxinly to under-
stand that this is the vital marrow of Scrip-
ture, a living fact whose presence and power
cannot be ignored, and wliich is wholly
independent of either the lower or higher
criticism. Let your hearers see, by your
personal attitude, that they need not be
perpetually dodging cannon-balls, accom-
panied with smoke, and flash, and roar,
that through the serried ranks of locked
bayonets the real Bible sweeps onward to
the conquest of the earth. Do not under-
take to wear Saul's armoi-. Go fortli with
sling and pebble, as David did, when he
answered the challenge of the proud Phil-
istine. The simplest view of the Bible is
the best, both for yourself and for your
hearei-s. Its free and reverent handling
will invest it with a })ower little dreamed
of; so pnit'ound in its insight, so searching

THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 129

its disclosure of the secrets of personal
unrest, and of national decadence, so true
to life its description of the moral conflict
which wages in every soul, so convincing
its revelation of the character of God, so
winning its p'ortraiture of Christ, so jteur-
ing and inspiring its promises and predic-
tions. Bring men at once into the Holy
of Holies, and they will forget the mer-
chants and money-changel's, the din of
whose voices fills the outer courts.

Of course, such a preaching of the Gos-
pel takes for granted that the personal
revelation of God in Jesus Christ has been
verified for you in personal experience.
The secret of the Lord must be in your
possession. With it, the most meagre
attainments in scholarship may make you
a messenger of power; without it, the
amplest literary equipment and the loftiest
eloquence will leave your speech " as sou7id-
ing brass, or a tinJdiyig cymbal,''''

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT IN
% PREACHING.

I PURPOSE ill the present lecture to fol-
low up tlie hint so admirably phrased by
the honored and mourned occupant of this
chair for 1884, but which he reluctantly
dismissed from thorough discussion, con-
tenting himself with saying that "a ser-
mon gets to be a sermon, and saves itself
from being a lecture, by being made and
delivered in the Holy Ghost." That ex-
presses the exact truth, and I deeply regret
that the man who could put the whole
matter so tersely, did not address himself
to its full exposition ; for a clear analysis
of the elements of what is called spirit-
uality, is of supreme importance both for
the preacher and for the hearer. I had
not read the sentence which I have quoted
until long after I had marked out the plan
of the present coiusi'. and had become
130

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 131

deeply absorbed in the theme on which I
venture to speak ; but I heard in it a
voice responding to my own convictions,
and urging me to renewed and severer and
prayerful reflection. That the preacher
should be a spiritual man, and that Sjv^ery
sermon should be saturated with the spirit-
ual element, as the atmosphere is charged
with moisture tind light, will be at once
admitted by every one; but the very
promptness of the admission constitutes
one of the difficulties of the discussion, as
if the self-evidence of the proposition pro-
vided also its definition. I shall, therefore,
ask you, first, to consider what spiritu-
ality is, and secondly, to inquire by what
methods it may be cultivated and cher-
ished.

There is a vast deal of vague and un-
satisfactory thought about the first ques-
tion. "Spiritualit}^ is frequently spoken of
as if it consisted in a peculiar tempera-
ment, the constitutional possession of a
few, or as if it were a special, super-
naturally imparted gift. A distinction is
often made between that general opera-
tion of the Holy Ghost, which issues in
regeneration, assurance and sanctification,

132 PHILOSOPTIT OF PREACHING.

the universal heritage of all believers, and
that special inchvelling of the Spirit which
constitutes a baptism, or an enduement
with power. They are regarded as essen-
tially distinct, as proceeding upo'n different
conditions, moving in different planes,
and designed for different ends. But
when Paul describes the gifts of th6 Spirit,
he not only makes them the manifesta-
tions and the operations of a single
energy, reducing all difference to one of
degree, he also affirms that the law of
distribution is a thoroughly rational and
impartial one, determined not only by the
personal sovereignty of the Holy Ghost,
dividing to every man severally as He will,
nor merely by the principle of grace or un-
merited favor, but also graduated to the
proportion of faith, "the receptive fac-
ulty," as Alford says, " for all spiritual
gifts." Sovereignty, grace, and the meas-
ure of faith are co-ordinated, and must be
regarded as interdependent and organically
indivisible ; and in the measure or propor-
tion of faith, personal responsibility and
personal activity are most clearly affirmed.
For while faith is the gift of God, it is also
the universal duty and prerogative of man ;

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 133

not an isolated or mechanical act, securing
the gift of personal salvation, defined as
trust in a person, but an habitual and
elevated state or grace of the soul, its
maturing power of spiritual perception,
appropriation, and activity. Our business,
therefore, concerns this personal attitude,
the completeness of our voluntary subjec
tion to faith ; for faith is the human condi-
tion determining and limiting the distribu-
tion of spiritual gifts.

Now faith is defined, in its generic and
essential being, as the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
It deals with the invisible, and has an im-
mutable conviction of the unseen as the
eternal reality, which rational conviction
urges to and secures moral conformity.
Faith is contrasted with sight, never with
knowledge. It is knowledge of the high-
est order, reason apprehending the unveiled
and eternal secrets of being, human and
Divine, so true that in their clear and com-
plete perception the moral law enacts itself
with all its sanctions. The spiritual man
is he who has the mind, the (fypovrj/jia of
the Spirit, who cherishes the thoughts, the
desires, and the aims of the Spirit, who

134 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

views all things in God, who adopts the
Divine estimates and purposes, who regards
all that is from its invisible and eternal
side, and who glacU}^, even eagerly, brings
his own life into haT)itual conformity with
the revelation. He is a seer, and he does
not permit himself to be disobedient to the
heavenly vision. Spirituality, then, is an
intensely active state. It is rational and
voluntary, a frame of mind which Paul
makes the evidence of regeneration, when
he declares that the mind of the Spirit is
life and peace, and which he contrasts with
the mind of the flesh, that carnal, sensu-
ous, self-centred, and selfish wa}^ of think-
ing and acting, against which every man
is warned as sure to end in death.

This rules out the notion that spirituality
is the equivalent of ecstasy, a breaking
through of the limits of conscious person-
ality, a contemplative absorption, in wliich
the reason is benumbed or paralyzed. This
is mysticism, and mysticism is a pantheistic
transformation of New Testament Christi-
anity. It is the child of the Orient, whose
heaven is Nirvana, and at an early day it
began to influence Christian tliought and
worship. Against this error Paul entered

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 135

his earnest protest in his correspondence
with the Chnrcli of Corinth, warning tliem
not to make tlie mistake of snpposing that
spiritual perceptions or experiences were
unintelligible, either to the recipient or to
the hearer. They spake with tongues, and
in such a state of excitement, that when
they sang, -or prayed, or exhorted, nobody
could understand them; while the confu-
sion was increased by several taking part
at one and the same time. The apostle
insisted that all this was wrong. He laid
down the doctrine that God is the God of
order, and that the spirits of the prophets
are subject to the prophets, that the highest
spiritual state is a conscious and voluntary
one. He appealed to his own experience.
He reminded his hearers, that he too had
the gift of tongues, and in a more remark-
able degree than they all, that he had been
caught up to the third heaven, when he did
not know whether he was in the body or
out of the body, but that even then he saw
and heard, the recipient of an intelligible
and remembered revelation, which he did
not feel at liberty to communicate ; and
that when he sang or prayed, it was not
only an act of the spirit, but also of the

136 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

understanding. He recognizes no excep-
tion to the rule that the spiritual state is
always a conscious, intelligent, ami iutelli-
gil)le one. It is the pagan notion of inspi-
ration, that the deit}^ mesmerizes the man,
throws him into physical convulsions, in-
duces epilepsy and mental vacuity, so that
he does not know what he is doing or say-
ing. Not such is Biblical inspiration, for the
writers of the Bible knew what they meant
to say, and to get at that meaning is our
chief business as reverent students of the
Word. Inspiration was not ecstasy, a Di- y^
vine mesmerism ; and least of all is spirit-
uality such a mood.

Nor is spirituality, primarily or mainly, ^

an emotional state, a condition of unusual
intensity of feeling, expressing itself in
boisterous or pathetic speech. It is not a l/
thing of tears and tones. The general law
of the sensibility is that it is not under the
direct control of the will. Its states are
involuntary and necessary concomitants of
perception and action, whether physical,
mental, or moral. Some nerve must be
touched and jarred l)efore there can be
pain, and then the ])ain comes without
your consent, nor can it be dismissed at

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 137

your option. You cannot make yourself
hungry or thirsty whenever you choose,
nor can you quiet the empty stomach and
cool the fever of parched lips by a com-
mand. Whether you shall have a bitter or
a sweet taste in your mouth, depends upon
your taking a lump of sugar or a quinine
pill. From a pleasant dream you wake
refreshed and sunnj^ ; from a horrible one
you wake exhausted and trembling. Good
news makes you happy ; bad news fills
you with alarm. Bright thoughts make
your face shine ; gloomy thoughts make
the countenance sad ; bitter thoughts create
a scowl. Love and hate are the reflex in
sensibility of the action of reason and will.
You can learn to love those whom once you
hated, by studying them more carefully,
judging them more impartially, by becom-
ing better acquainted with them ; and the
same process may change your attachment
into aversion. The emotion changes under
the new estimate which prolonged atten-
tion creates. If that attention, which is
only reason held to its task by the will,
discloses some element of good behind the
most repulsive wrappings, love will come
to its birth.

138 riJILOsOPUY OF PEE ACHING.

Not otherwise is the love for God waked ^
in human hearts. It comes through the
revehition of what God is and does, by
the apprehension of His veracity and in-
finite goodness. The will compels the
soul to look and listen, to hear and heed
the revelation; and when this result has
been secured, the emotions of peace and
joy bring their sunshine and their song
into life. So far as the process of con-
version can be traced, it begins in the
will as compelling attention, and it is com-
pleted in the gradual clearing away of mis-
apprehensions, in the emergence of right
ethical perce[)ti()ns and judgments, in an
intelligent, unprejudiced view of self, and
of God's attitude towards man in Jesus
Christ. Repentance is simply change of
mind, induced by serious and prolonged
attention, which attention becomes a fixed
voluntary mental habit, and the convic-
tions thus formed become the formative
elements of the regenerated character and
conduct. The new mental perceptions,
changed through the will into the organic
law of moral life, evoke, Iw necessary
reflex action, the appropriate emotions of
penitence, peace, hope, joy, and love. So

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 139

that the Scriptural injunction is as pro-
foundly philosophical as it is practical,
" whatsoever things are true, whatsoever
things are honest, whatsoever things are
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso-
ever things are lovely, whatsoever things
are of good report ; if there be any praise,
think on these things." The emphasis is V
on the rational, not on the emotional ; if
men will only think upon the right things,
the things that are true and fair and pure,
with an intensity and continuity that shall
mak€ every rational perception a law to
the moral nature.^ and a principle of per-
sonal conduct, the appropriate feelings will
come of themselves, as perfume exhales /
from flowers. v/

There are many who sneer at doctrinal
preaching, who tell us that intellectualism
in religion is cold and chilling, and that
the true sphere of Christian experience is
in the sensibilities. Matthew Arnold's fa-
mous phrase that religion is "morality
touched with emotion," expresses this
phase of modern religious philosophy. Re-
ligion is viewed as the poetry and sentiment
of practical life. In the biblical conception,
it is not emotion which transfisfures moral-

140 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

ity into religion, but the open vision of the
living God, the profound and habitual
conviction of His presence, His moral ma-
jesty, and His eternal compassion. Men
are changed into the image of Christ by
the Spirit of the Lord, through that fixed
attention which reveals, and in revealing
imparts, the spiritual glory of the Son of
(lod. The process is voluntary and rational,
not emotional. Let practical morality be
moved b}^ the thought of what God is, as
revealed in Jesus Christ, and it will become
Di\dne. The earthly, the sensual, the sel-
fish, will drop away, as dead leaves fall be-
fore the push of swelling buds. And the
fountains of the deep will be broken up.
There will be tears and laughter, trembling
and hope, shame and exultant joy. Great
thoughts are what Herder called for, when
he lay dying; and great thoughts are the
bread which men must eat if they are to
become sinewy and strong, with the flush
'of health upon the cheek.

A rational religion cannot be passionless.
To look upon the things that are invisible,
to have an abiding personal conviction of
their reality and their eternal majesty, can-
not leave a man icy and inactive. It will

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 141

make every nerve in liim quiver, every drop
of blood in liis veins boil. The vision will
evoke the passion. Let a man drift down
the Niagara River, with hands folded, and
half asleep, until the warning roar of the
cataract rouses him and makes him atten-
tive. What makes him seize the oars, and
bend to his work, until every muscle is at
its utmost strain, and the breath comes hot
and quick from his lips ? He has seen the
impending danger, and he has heard the
angry tones of the abyss. Should he suc-
ceed in gaining the sliore, or make the aw-
ful plunge without loss of life, no one would
need to tell him to rejoice. The danger
would be that the necessary reaction in the
sensibility would throw him into a swoon,
if it did not paralyze the action of the
heart. Neither can any man have a vivid
conception of what God is, in His holiness
and grace, in His majesty and power, in
His infinity and eternity, without experi-
encing the correspondent emotions of alarm,
of remorse, of penitence, of despair, of hope,
of joy. What the feelings shall be will
depend upon the attitude which the will
assumes to the disclosure. The thought
which is real and vital to the soul, before

142 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHIXG.

whose authority the will bows, and to
which it compels obedience, cannot main-
tain its place and do its work without
rousing the sensibilities, any more than a
bar of red-hot iron can be applied to your
flesh without provoking a cry of pain.
You can play at thinking, give yourself
up to intellectual amusement, and learn to
laugh when you deal with the most awful
themes ; but then you do not really believe
or see them, they have not become eternal
realities to you. When thought does be-
come vital, and when your will locks arms
with your conviction, you will have all the
feeling you can take care of. "jSIeditate
on these things " was the great apostle's
parting word to Timothy, "■ give thyself
wholly to them, that thy profiting may
appear to all " ; an excellent rule for the
individual Christian, and for the Christian
preacher.
\ / That the feelings are not directly under
our control, and should not form the bur-
den of our immediate anxiety, is plain also
when you consider another fact of great
importance. One emotion may be crowded
out by another and an opposite one. You
can bec(mie unconscious of hunger, weari-

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 143

ness, and even acute pain, by complete ab-
sorption in something else. You may not
be able to eat Avhile your thought is brood-
ing, and you may be insensible to great
physical discomfort. A great joy, or an
overwhelming sorrow, takes away your ap-
petite. A sudden danger makes you care-
less of appearances. Sleep forsakes you
when the sick demand your attention.
Fear vanishes when a great crisis is upon
you. The lower emotion retreats before
the hiofher. But how ? You do not deal
directly with your feelings ; something
comes in to change the direction of your
thoughts, until by attention they are di-
verted and riveted, and as these new
thoughts master you, the feelings change
without effort on your part. Now, this
fact is of the highest practical impor-
tance. If you want to change your own
feelings, or the feelings of others, there
must be a change in the thoughts ; you
must give to the mental vision a different /
direction.

I might tarry here to show that this sim-
ple rule provides you with a principle of
the highest order for your pastoral duties,
in your treatment of inquirers, in your

14-4 PHILOSOPHY OF PliEACHIXG.

visits to the sick, in your converse ■with
the bereaved and the despondent. You
must honor the law of expulsion, and you
nuist expel by the earnest use of other
thoughts, until you have induced a healthy
mental vision. But this is not my present
purpose ; and a hint is, perhaps, all that is
needed here. I am trying to make it clear
that spirituality is not an emotional state,
as the emotions are not directly under our
control, and cannot therefore be regarded
as moral or spiritual per se; and that a
higher emotion can displace a lower one
only by the introduction of another and
intenser thought. The lions in the -way
filled Christian -with alarm, until he saw
that the}^ were chained, and then he marched
between them singing. The valley of shad-
ows did not affright David, because he
knew that the Divine shepherd was Avith
liim. It was under the power of a rational
judgment that Paul sacrificed the world
for Christ. There was not a })article of
sentiment in his decision, and in his adher-
ence to it. He looked at his stripes and
scars as medals of honor, stamped into his
fiail and mortal body. To die was to fin-
ish his ministry with joy, and then to be

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 145

forever with his Lord. He never whined. c^
There is no " holy tone " in his epistles,
and there could have been none in his
speech. He rejoiced in tribulation, be-
cause it brought glory. He apologized
for referring to his sufferings and his ex-
alted privileges, as if ashamed of institut-
ing any comparison between himself and
other men, or of calling attention to what
was purely personal to himself. He did
not ask for pit}^ when he lay in a dungeon
and anticipated martyrdom ; he wanted to
be congratulated, and he was always joy-
ful himself. Now, this was not a matter
of temperament with him, nor were his
courage and hope miraculously imparted
and sustained; it was the inevitable emo-
tional result of his way of looking at things.
He, like Moses, endured as seeing Him who
is invisible ; and such rational perception
of the eternal is always and everywhere
the essence of heroism. He who walks /
with God is mighty, and will hush men
into awe.

The apostle himself defines spirituality, /
when he speaks of it, as "the spirit of
power, of love, and of a sound mind."
The statement is anti-climactic. It in-

146 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

eludes the will, the emotions, and the rea-
son ; but the mood has its rise in mental
sanity, produces love, and issues in moral
energy. The first thing is soundness of
mind, looking at things as they really are,
and at all things in their ordered and eter-
nal unity. Spirituality is simply downright
common sense. I do not even say " sanc-
tified " common sense, for unsanctified com-
mon sense is the baldest nonsense. "■ Be
spiritual " is only another way of saying,
"Be sensible," for the man is a fool who
never thinks of his immortal soul, and
who puts God out of his thoughts.

It accords with this that the common
designation of the Hol}^ Spirit is the
" Spirit of Truth." He convicts men of
sin, righteousness, and judgment. He
takes of the things of Christ, and reveals
them unto us. He brings them to our
remembrance. He regenerates and sanc-
tifies men through the truth. He moves
the heart by enlightening the understand-
ing. He opens our eyes and unstops our
ears ; and when once the soul has seen the
glory of the Lord, responding to it by a
prompt obedience, tlie lips break forth in
song, and the life will be transfigured.

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 147

The sword of the Spirit is the Word of
God, His revealed and living thought,
piercing to the marrow, dissecting soul and
spirit, discerning the thoughts and intents
of the heart. The spiritually minded man
is he who accepts the judgment resulting
from this comparison, and who gives to
the revealed thought of God the sole, and
continuous, and comprehensive supremacy
over himself. This is the (f)p6vr]/ji,a tov irvev-
/x,aro<i in which every sermon should be
made and preached, and without which
it is not a sermon at all. It includes a
rational, an emotional, and a voluntar}^
element ; for all these are involved in the
word which Paul uses ; but, as we have
seen, the emotional quality comes in by
reflex action, while the rational and the
voluntary features are the ones with which
we are summoned actively and energeti-
cally to deal. Spirituality is the fixed and
obedient mental habit of piercing to that
which is essential, universal, and eternal.

Now, the invisible universe, so far as
we have any knowledge of it, is consti-
tuted by two factors, and only two, — God
and the soul. Everything else resolves
itself into the interpretation and the rela-

148 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

tion of these two personal subsistences.
Law and government, whether human
or Divine, are not separate entities ; the}^
inhere and are identical with the living
thoughts of God or of man. They are
what they are, simply because God and
man are what they are. They could not
be other than they are, nor can they ever
suffer change, simply because God is what
He is by an eternal, voluntary, moral ne-
cessit}', and because He made man in his
image. The task of spirituality in preach-
ing, then, is this, to estimate the soul as
it really is, and to estimate God as He
really is.

And who are you, and who are they to
whom you speak ? AVhat is man ? You may
define him by the physical element of his nat-
ure, whose powers are insignificant, whose
days are an handbreadth, whose achieve-
ments are vanity. You may define him in
the terms of his moral consciousness, under
the dominion of sin and guilt, restless in
his bondage, yet hopelessly enslaved. But
in all this you have not reached the living
thouo-ht of God. You are more than all
this, though you might never have dreamed
of it had it not been revealed to you. You

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 149

are a child of God. You are a temple in
ruins ; but, as John Howe says, you are a
temple still ; or as Horace Bushnell says,
there is an awful dignity in your degrada-
tion even. If you are honest and fearless
with yourself, you will be habitually peni-
tent and contrite, in view of your repeated
failures and shortcomings ; broken in heart,
contrite in spirit, because you are so great
a sinner, falling so far short of what you
ought to be. You will never outgrow the
fifty-first Psalm. You can never become
proud and self-conceited, nor rest content
with 3^our best work. You will never over-
take either your personal or your profes-
sional ideal. You may not burn last
year's sermons, but you will not j^reach
them a second time, until they have been
born again in the travail of your better
thought. But you will advance beyond this
estimate of your conscious moral imper-
fection and immaturity. There will come
to you also the thought that the prodi-
gal son, ragged, hungry, and disgraced,
is a son still. This is the transfiguring
touch upon our self-knowledge. You have
looked into your own mirror, and have
seen an immortal soul under the power of

150 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

sill. / Now, look into your genealogy, and
into the face of Jesus Christ. God has
never surrendered, not qualified in the
least His j)aternal claim upon you, and
there is not one of you whom He is will-
ing to lose. There is a place in His heart
and in heaven for you ; and it will be for-
ever empty, if you do not come back to
fill it. " Beloved, now are we the sons of
God," is the repeated refrain of John, in
gospel and epistle, the silver bugle-note to
which his every thought marches; and
that will lift you to the highest heavens.
Think of 3'ourself in that wa}', and pov-
erty will lose its sting, any sphere of ser-
vice will be great, whether on the frontier
or in the metropolis, whether among the
cultured or the savage, powers will be
consecrated and grow lustrous, obscurity
will be radiant, fame will shine with a
su})ernal glory, grief will have its mighty
consolation, life will be an unendinii" son"',
and death will l)e the open gate to your
Father's house.

And remember, what you are, as thus
read in the light of God's living thought,
everybody else is — the beggar, the out-
cast, the millionnairc, tlie ld)orcr, the white

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 151

man, and the black man. All men are
made in the Divine image. All men are
dear to God. All men are redeemed in
Christ. There is no monopoly in the Di-
vine adoption ; for the blood of Adam
courses in all veins, and the blood of Jesus
Christ is the seal of a universal reconcilia-
tion. Now this way of estimating man is
the spiritual way, because it fixes attention
upon the invisible and essential kernel of
being ; and that is the only rational pro-
cedure. Under such an estimate you will
respect and love all men, however ignorant
and debased they may have become ; and
you will not cease to pray for them, and
labor with them, until they are withdrawn
from earth. For upon this estimate, there
must always remain an infinite chasm be-
tween the most abandoned man or woman,
and a brute. It is this perception which
distinofuishes the Christian civilization from
all preceding and contemporaneous ones.
It was a theatrical flourish, when Terence
cried out, "Nothing human I count foreign
to myself " ; a hollow mockery of senti-
ment, when you recall the frightful scenes
of the gladiatorial contests, and read of the
cold-blooded butcheries of the Coliseum.

152 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

The thought was not a vital and vitalizing
one. There was no regard for human life,
no respect for woman, no pity for children,
no compassion for the slave. The infinite
value of the human soul in the sight of
God, it has well been said, came upon the
thoughts of nu'ii like a new and startling
revelation ; and its leavening power is yet
far from having done its mighty work. It
is the hardest practical thing for you and
me to do, to estimate men by what they
are as immortal and moral beings, infinitely
dear to God, and to treat them accordingly.
But that is the foremost sign and evidence
of spiritual-mindedness. It will make you
tender and solicitous. It will make you
brave and impartial. It will make you dem-
ocratic. It will make you cosmopolitan,
with a hand for every man, and a heart for
all the world. It will make your preaching
spiritual because it will reflect the mind of
the Holy Spirit, and so be eternally true.

It has not escaped you, I am sure, that
I have not been able to speak of the esti-
mate of man as our point of departure,
from which we sliould proceed to the mak-
ing and delivery of every sermon, without
passing over to the view of God which

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 153

should sliape our conscious and habitual
thought. I have transcended the testi-
mony of natural psychology in affirming
that man is made in the image of God,
and that he is the child of God, and in in-
sisting that this is the only rational stan-
dard of valuation for ourselves and for
others. I have assumed a revelation of
God in defining what man is ; I have put
my theology into my anthropology. For
sonship involves fatherhood, and the filial
dignity can be measured only by the pater-
nal rank and provision. But this was in-
evitable ; for the whole truth is not stated
when we say that our conceptions of what
God is must be necessarily anthropomor-
phic in their content and expression : it is
also true, and it is the deeper truth, that
our conceptions of what man is, must, in
order to be exact and complete, be theo-
morphic. Man must be viewed in God,
that is, in the light of God's eternal, living
thought, which is inseparable from his
essential being. For what God is, deter-
mines what man, created in His image, is
by original vocation, what he ought to be,
and what he may become ; and what God
is, discloses what His thoughts and pur-

154 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

poses must be concerning man. So that
the knowledge of God has priority, in the
logical order, over the knowledge of man ;
but in the chronological or experimental
order, the relation is reversed. For the
knowledge of God, which is eternal life,
is not the precipitate of deductive logic,
starting from some metaphysical concep-
tion of Him, implicitly lodged in the ra-
tional intuition of the soul. It is the fruit
of inductive reasoning, based upon the facts
of a historical revelation, reaching its ma-
turity in the person and ministry of our
Lord. He reveals the Father, and in so
doing He interprets man's place and gra-
cious prerogative.

I shall have more to say of this farther
on ; at the present I wish only to empha-
size the thought that what God is, deter-
mines the mind of the spirit, or the spirit-
uality of the preacher. His mental tone
and temper will be shaped by his living
thought of God. There is no department
of dogmatics where he needs to exercise
greater care, where he requires greater
accuracy, docility, and comprehensiveness,
than in forming his doctrine of God. A
partial view, or a distorted one, in wliicli

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 155

the scripturally historical perspective is
not jealously maintained, will vitiate all
his mental processes and his spoken words.
He must prepare himself to give to every
revelation which God has made of Himself,
its natural and unqualified force, even if
he should find it impossible to combine
them all into a perfectly coherent unity.
It may be that the Divine majesty, its bal-
anced and rounded moral perfection, while
it was incarnated in a human life, cannot
be reproduced in mental concepts, nor pho-
tographed in the speech of man. The point
of supreme importance is that God be rec-
ognized as the Living One, the Subject of
conscious, voluntary movement in thought,
emotion, and action. His Being may be so
construed as to eliminate the reality of
all human personality, and to recognize in
second causes only a nominal energy ; and
it will make little difference whether this
pervasive and exclusive presence be defined
in terms of substance, as Spinoza does, or
in terms of thought, as Hegel does, or
in terms of will, as Jonathan Edwards
does, an unethical fatalism will be the re-
sult ; and a kind of speechless awe will
characterize the resultant piety. The glory

156 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

of God will be regarded as the final cause
of all things, to be secured and displayed
at any cost, giving no account of itself to
angel or man ; and I do not see how any
man can avoid feeling sometimes, that such
a God, while commanding unselfishness —
is supremely selfish Himself.

But this is the God of metaphysical
theology, which makes Will in God pri-
mary, inclusive, and sovereign. Such a
God is a speculative fiction ; He is not
the God who reveals Himself in the his-
tory of the world, in tlie record of Scrip-
ture, and in the face of Jesus Christ.
These media disclose a sovereignty which
has given reality to second causes, to the
life of created reason, and to moral re-
sponsibility in man, and which is infinitely
sensitive and conscientious in maintaining
and guarding what it has called into exis-
tence. The immanence is such that it
eliminates neither the Divine personal tran-
scendence, nor tlu; full reality and respon-
sibility of tlie dependent creature. "In
Him we live, and move, and have our
being" ; but in that interpenetration there
is a Him, and there is a We ; the per-
sonal distinctions are rio-orouslv conserved.

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 157

That fact is of infinitely greater practical
importance for ns than a speculative theory
of the nexus between God and the world.
An inductive logic compels us to rest in
theological dualism, just as we are forced
to recognize a natural dualism in an induc-
tive philosophy of perception. Theological
determinism is open to the same objections
which lie against philosophical idealism;
it does not deal honestly with the facts,
and the logical process is deductive, not
inductive. The facts reveal a God who,
while Sovereign, does not regard the cre-
ated universe as a shadow, nor use men as
machines. Freedom is a real thing, not
merely formal ; and even God does not in-
vade its prerogatives. He does not choose
for me, nor does He, in any strict sense,
choose in me. In a word. He is the Liv-
ing God, alive to what is due to Himself,
alive to what is due to everything that He
has made, promoting His glory by promot-
iuQ^ the hig-hest well-being- of the universe.
The doctrine of the Divine immutability
supplies another instance in which a deduc-
tive logic has thrust the living God prac-
tically out of sight. His uncliangeableness
has been conceived as erasing all distinc-

158 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

tions in time, in thought, in emotion, and
in action. He, we are tokl, dwells in an
eternal Now ; ^vith Him there is no past,
and no future. Strictly speaking, it has
been urged, there can be no conscious suc-
cession of thought in God, no real change
in His feelings, no separate and succes-
sive volitions. The whole conscious life
of Deity is interpreted " sub specie eterni-
tatis," in which succession and change can
form no conceivable part. The past, the
present, and the future, are represented as
held in the grasp of a single thought ; all
separate volitions as merged in a single,
eternal act of the will ; and no varying
emotional states are recoo-nized as havino-
anything more than an apparent, anthro-
pomorphic realit3\

You may call such a Being the Living,
Personal God; but it is difficult to see
how such an activity differs from an eter-
nal and hopeless quiescence. I am free to
say, that to my way of thinking, an eter-
nal Now, as that phrase is theologically
used, is eternal nonsense. It is a pure
assumption that omniscience destroys the
diffei'ences between memory, present per-
ception, and prevision. It is a pure as-

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 159

sumption that unity of thought eliminates
separateness and succession in conscious
thinking. It is a pure assumption that
unit}^ of will resolves all separate voli-
tions into a figure of speech. It is a pure
assumption that the ethical blessedness of
God makes it impossible for Him to be the
subject of emotional change, to pass from
wrath to pity, and from pity to love, and
from love to indignation. And all this is
squarely in the teeth of all that God has
said, through the records of Scripture, and
by the words of Jesus Christ. He speaks
of Himself as grieving over sin, as plead-
ing with men, as roused to judgment, as
hearing and answering prayer, as remem-
bering His covenant, as preparing the way
for future displays of power and grace.
He is never surprised, nor is He ever out-
witted. Foreordination is eternal and in-
clusive ; but that does not destroy the
distinction between what God remembers
as past, and what He sees as present, and
what He knows as future. The separate
and successive Divine volitions are co-
ordinated in the eternal will, — not one of
them is arbitrary, revolutionary, disturbing
the vital unity of His holy purpose, — but

IGO PHILOSOPHY OF PKEAVIIING.

that does not destroy the difference, in the
Divine consciousness, between what God
has done, and is now doing, and will do
hereafter. The will, like the thought of
God, is in living, conscious movement.
Change and succession are in them, as well
as unity.

Nor is it otherwise with the emotional
life of God, when scripturally interpreted.
There is pain in His blessedness. Sin
rouses His indignation, and the perception
of penitence, as with us, wakes in Him the
sense of gladness and provokes His instant
approval. A rational ethical unity under-
lies and pervades all this, but the unity
only gives eternal validity to the change
which comes to the heart of God, when
the sinner becomes a penitent. All this is
as clear as noonday w^hen what God says
about Himself is allowed its natural force ;
and I need not stop to show how such a
perception of God makes Him intensel}'
real, in vital contact with the soul of num.

But the most important thing yet remains
to be said. Notliing is more indispensable
for tlie spiritual life of the preacher, and
for the spiritual power of his preaching,
than a firm gi'as]i u])on the ethical unity

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 161

of God's nature, and so upon the ethical
unity of His moral government. Here
the great battle has been between the
justice and the mercy of God, between
His holiness and His grace. The atone-
ment has been represented as their eternal
reconciliation, or as an economic compro-
mise between their conflicting claims, as if
God were doing the best He could to pay
His own debts, or paying no more than
was actually necessary. Whether it is so
intended or not, such a representation
makes God in painful conflict with Him-
self, and destroys the unity of his ethical
life. Then, again, the justice of God has
been made central, and love has been
remanded to a subordinate place, as in
the Westminster Confession, and in the
Calvinistic theology generally. Grace has
been limited to the elect, and election has
been supposed to embody an eternal, sov-
ereign, unconditional decree. Explain it
as you will, the sober, plain Christian
judgment pronounces such a doctrine hard,
cruel, irrational, immoral, and blasphemous.
It is an outrage on man, and an insult to
God ; and agitation will not cease until in
all the symbols the love of God is given

162 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

an equal place with His justice, instead
of being cicnvded into a preliminary and
introductory definition ; until tlie ethical
unity of the Divine nature gets its full
recognition, in which his justice is his
mercy, and his grace is his holiness.

And finally, the etliical unity of the
Divine nature and government has l)een
sacrificed in the theory of probation,
whose logical outcome is its extension
beyond death until every soul has faced
the ''historic Christ." The antediluvians
were not fairly treated, if this theory is
true ; the patriarchs had an exceedingly
hard time of it ; the millions of the heathen
have been cruelly neglected of God, though
we hope that He will settle His account
with them l)y and hy to their satisfaction ;
only a ver}^ insignificant part of the human
race has been treated in moral e(piity,
though between this and the final judg-
ment (rod will correct all the blunders of
His past and prcsi-nt administration. IJut
who has authority to say that righteousness
and grace are thus held in practical sus-
pense, and relegated to the unknown fut-
ure? If all this issues from the doctrine
of mortal [)robation, then for one, I \\\\\

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 163

eliminate it as an Arminian heresy from
my dogmatic system, rather than destroy
the ethical unity of God's character, and
deny the fact of a present and universal
order of righteousness in human history.

I want a present and living God, a God
who puts His whole ethical being into every
moment of time, who deals with every
soul, infant and adult. Christian and pa-
gan, in Jesus Christ ; though I may not be
able to make manifest to my reason this
immanent and universal blending of right-
eousness and grace. I appeal to the Scrip-
tures, and to the natural force of their
language, that God is neither an omnipo-
tent and exclusive energy, nor a mechan-
ically immutable and unemotional entity,
nor an arbitrary and partial Sovereign, nor
a being in whom ethical unity is a figment,
of whom the organic balance and living
co-operation of moral qualities can be
affirmed only as a transcendental fact, and
who deals with men on purely arbitrary
principles, suspending a present, moral
equity of administration for a future im-
partial treatment ; but the " Father " from
the beginning, and the Father of all men.
This is the last and inclusive word in the

164 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

self-revelatioii of God to men, and he who
contents himself with anything less, robs
himself of what the best thoujTht of God
can give him, and so far forth he fails of
conveying the full spiritual power of his
message. • For this is the mind of the
Holy Spirit, that it hath pleased the
Father, l)y the blood of the cross, to rec-
oncile all things unto Himself; and if the
history of redemption is the fulfilment of
an eternal purpose, the vital unfolding of
the eternal thought of God, then j-ou have
no right to think of God in any other way.
Fatherhood constitutes the final and inclu-
sive definition of His nature, and of His
government. The law which commands
and exacts holiness is paternal legislation.
The severest judgments are the warnings
and the punishments of a Father. His
pity and His patience are paternal in their
quality, scope, and continuance. True, it
is an ethical Fatherhood, uniting holiness
and love ; but it is a Fatherliood, not an
ethical, imperial sovereignty, or merely
moral governorship. The paternal con-
ception of God does not ignore the ethical
element of lioly autliority, but transfigures
it under the higliur thought of an infinite.

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 165

universal, absolutely unselfish love ; and,
in so doing, it legitimates that estimate of
man which has already commanded our
attention. The rational, voluntary, and
joyful recognition of these organically re-
lated estimates of Avhat man is, and what
God is, constitutes the essence of spiritual-
mindedness, and every sermon issuing
from such an habitual mental and moral
temper will be made in the Holy Ghost,
and will be preached in the demonstration
of the Spirit, and in power. For the Word
of God is only then preached, when it con-
veys the Father's message to His blind and
wayward and guilty children.

A consideration of the methods by which
spirituality may be cultivated and cher-
ished, is a matter of too serious moment
to be overlooked, and too important to be
despatched in a few sentences. I shall,
therefore, resume the discussion at this
point in the next lecture.

11.

In defining spirituality as a fixed mental
and moral habit, to be carefully distin-
guished from ecstasy or from emotional
excitement, having its rational ground in
the clear discernment of what God and
man are in their essential nature, and in
their mutual relations, and its ethical
quality in the voluntary and habitual sub-
jection of the conscious and active life to
the judgments which such discernment
forms, I have propounded no theory of my
own. I have simply given to the language
of Scripture its natural force. Spirituality
is, in the carefully selected phraseology of /
Paul, <pp6v7]fMa Tov Tri^eu/xaTO?, the mind of
the spirit. The word ^povrnjua lias no
exact English equivalent. It is not sy-
nonymous with vov<;, the equivalent of our
word understanding or reason, the faculty
of rational perception and judgment. Our
166

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 167

nearest approach to such a use of the word
" mind " as makes it reflect the meaning
of (f)p6i>7}fxa is in the frequent popuhir say-
ing, "I have a great mind to do this or
that," a phrase which not only expresses
a rational judgment, but also announces
an intention. (t>p6vr]/j,a is derived from
the root (f)p)]v, which, literally, means
" diaphragm,'* the muscle which separates
the heart and the lungs from the lower
viscera, and so it became descriptive of all
the organs clustering around the heart,
which together constitute the seat of phys-
ical life. By a natural transition it was
carried up to describe the interior consti-
tution of the invisible and conscious self,
the sum total of the soul's rational, emo-
tional and volitional powers, the organ of
grief^ love, anger, and courage, of mental
perception and thought, of will and pur-
pose. It is the man in the centre of his
personality, stripped of all that is seeming
and accidental. The "mind" in you is
what you are, in your thoughts, desires,
and aims. Not all the thoughts which
you have belong to your mind, but only
such thoughts as are intensely vital, stir-
ring your deepest emotions and impelling

168 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

you to action. Not all that you feel
belongs to your mind, but only such emo-
tions as spring out of your thoughts and
shape your conduct. Not everything that
you do shows what your mind is, but only
such actions as are the outcome of rational
conviction and genuine love. The ''mind"
of a man, is what he is, in the organic
unity of his secret thoughts, affections, and
aims. He has the mind of the flesh, if the
gravitation of his inmost self is towards
the things of the flesh, the things that
minister to selfish ease and ambition, no
matter how refined his pursuits and habits
may be. The carnally minded man is not
necessarily a coarse man. He need not be
a glutton, or a drunkard, or a debauchee.
He may be a man of Ijlameless reputation.
But he is, everywhere and always, selfish,
self-centred, and self-seeking, with his eye
on the main chance, taking care of number
one, an altruistic egoist if he gives any
thought to his neighbor, counting nothing
real which does not bring present and
tangible advantage. And to be spiritually
minded is to have the thoughts, the desires,
and the aims of the spirit, to survey and
measure all things from the centre of the

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 169

invisible and the eternal, judging yourself
as God judges you, treating your fellow-
men as God would have you treat them,
estimating life as God estimates it, honor-
ing God as He deserves to be honored.

A curious illustration of the vagueness
which encompasses this important question
of spirituality, the mental fog in which
many preachers labor when they venture
to give definite outline to their thought
upon it, has recently fallen under my eye
in a report of an elaborate sermon, preached
by one of our city pastors. The concord-
ance had been freely and faithfully used.
There were Scriptural quotations in abun-
dance, and these gave a decidedly evangeli-
cal flavor to the discourse. There Avas a
certain rude logical order in the arrange-
ment of the biblical material, but it was
purely verbal, and of a real analysis there
was not the slightest trace. The only
approach to a real discernment of the
problem was in the hint, now and then
obtruded, that spirituality was the reverse
of ceremonialism in worship and conduct ;
but it was evident that such interjected
phrases were little more than the mechan-
ical repetition of current platitudes of

170 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

speech, and that their real significance had
not become clearly outlined to the preach-
er's mind. The sermon bore tlie marks of
faithful, painstaking work. The tone was
modest and quiet; there was no attempt
at theoretical display ; and it was evidently
the work of an earnest and devout man ;
but it left the hearer just where it found
him, with a mass of l)iblical texts, not one >^^
of which had been compelled to yield its
mighty secret. It was unutterably lifeless
and dull, for the simple reason that it was
unintelligible. It lacked defiuite mental
perception, and, therefore, ended in mental
cloudiness and confusion. Much was said
about being "filled with the Spirit," but
the phrase touched no living chord ; it had
a mystical ring, as descriptive of some
strange, supernatural or miraculous opera-
tion, in which tlie soul is passive, and
which defies explanation and expression.
It may seem to you a hard and narrow
rule, but it is an eminently practical and
salutary one for the preacher, as I believe
it to l)e inexorably universal, that what is W"
true is always intelligible, that revelation
is unveiling, not mystification, and that
the time of the sermon is worse than

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 171

wasted, unless the message is so phrased
that every man can understand it.

There is nothing shadowy or mystical
in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and
in the resultant spirituality of life. It is
an intelligent and intelligible state. It is
conscious and voluntary. The preacher to
whom I have referred might have made
his sermon luminous and searching by sim-
ply inquiring what ceremonialism in wor-
ship was. It is membership in the visible
church, observance of the Sabbath, sul>
scription to a creed, a reverent posture in
prayer, a decent behavior among men, the
regular and reverent participation in ordi-
nances. It is devotion to externals. It is
contentment with forms. It is regard for
appearances. In or out of the church, that
is Pharisaism, the mind of the flesh, giv-
ing no true liberty, and cursing the soul
with drought and increasing impotence.
It is living in the realm of the seen and the
temporal. And what is the opposite of
ceremonialism ? It is the worship of God
in spirit and truth, the converse which is
the natural and habitual outcome of a clear
knowledge of what God is and of what
you are, the conscious and mutual ex-

172 PIIILOSOniY OF PREACHING.

change of thought between an erring,
needy, penitent ehikl and its Holy, Loving
Father, who is in heaven. In or out of
the church, that is spirituality, the fixed
habit of dealing mth invisible and eternal
realities. To be filled with the Spirit is
simply to be under the dominance of those
convictions which give reality to God and
the soul, as the two sole factors by which
the univei-se is constituted, and b}- whicli
time and eternity are shaped. For when
the heavens and the earth pass away, God
remains and the soul abides. The reason
and the will are the sphere of the Divine
impact and indwelling ; these are not mys-
tical, but dynamic, and they are dynamic
by illumination of the understanding and
by securing voluntary obedience to the
revelation. To be filled with tlie S})irit is
the same thing as being guided by the
Spirit into all truth ; it is to see tilings as
they really are, and to act in accordance
with that vision. Spirituality, therefore,
is a rational and voluntary state. It l)egins
with mental sanity, piercing through all
shams and deceptive appearances, to God
as the Holy Father, and to man as His lost
and wandering child. It is easy enough to

(^

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 173

repeat these phrases, but they are not real
perceptions unless they become the fixed
and habitual temper of your whole mental
and moral life, the standard of universal
rational judgment, and the living law of
obethence. With every advance in the
clearness of your apprehension of Avhat
God is and what man is, there must come,
pari passu, the prompt and voluntary prac-
tical response. You must live as you
think ; you must be obedient to the heav-
enly vision ; for God and the soul, father-
hood and sonship, are not figures of speech,
the empty generalizations of the specula-
tive understanding, but the only eternal
realities in a universe of change.^

1 The nature of man is rational, ethical, spiritual ;
it may be regarded as voiis, as (TvveiSr]ffts and as Tri'tC^a.
How do these differ ?

Considered as rational, the quest of the soul is
Truth. Its watchword is Reality.

Considered as ethical, the soul fixes attention upon
a peculiar quality with which truth is invested, giving
to it the force of an imperative, demanding personal
conformity, and enforcing universal self-judgment.
Its watchword is Obligation.

Considered as spiritual, the soul fixes attention
upon God as the eternal fountain of Truth, and the
creative source of Moral Law, Himself the uncreated
and sovereign Reality and Imperative.

PHILOSOPHY OF PREACmXG.

I have spoken of spirituality as a fixed
mental and moral habit, and habit involves
careful and patient cultivation. I proceed,
therefore, to speak of the methods by
which this quality must be developed into
liealthy and vigorous maturity. Of these,
the first place must be given to attention.
If even the physical universe does not
yield its secret to the inattentive and su-
perficial observer, if the inspection must he
repeated and discriminating, with the per-
sistent use of microscope and telescope
and the most delicate instruments, much
more true is it that the invisible realities

rii/eCyua, as Julius Miiller says, does not primarily
mean the human spirit., but the Divine Spirit; and
man becomes spiritual only as, by his free act, his
rational and ethical life is pervaded, purified, and per-
fected by and in the Holy Ghost. Spirituality is a
voluntary state of rational and ethical subjection.
Hence, the Germans translate nvfvu&riKhs, by the
word (jeistlich, not (/eisti(i, — spirit-Jike ; that is, con-
formity to spirit, conforaiity to the Spirit of God.
Spirituality represents a capacity, which may and
oufjht to become a reality ; but not a constituent ele-
ment of universal human nature, like tiie rational or
the ethical, lieason is an essential i)roperty. Every
man thinks. The process is involuntary and neces-
sary. Conscience is a universal characteristic of
human nature. It is ineajjiible of increase or de-
crea,se. Judas has as nuuli conscience as Paul, or

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 175

of Divine and human being demand hon-
est, patient, and prolonged attention. No
physiological processes can give us so
much as a glimpse of the soul, or cast any
light upon its essential constitution. You
might as well attempt to construct the
science of anatomy by an analysis and
synthesis of the deliverances of conscious-
ness. The soul is an ultimate and invisi-
ble fact, the whole evidence of whose real
existence is crystallized in the personal
pronoun " I," and whose real nature can be
understood only by the cross-examination
which reflection employs. If psychology

Peter, or John. Every man judges himself, and is
the subject of self-approval, or of self-reproach. The
process is involuntary and necessary. The spiritual
is a constitutional capacity, whereby, in a free act and
state, man places himself under the tuition and the
guidance of God, becoming like Him in thought, in
feeling, in volition, and in life. Its distinguishing
characteristic is the supreme place which it gives to
the Free Will in man, that will summoning the rea-
son to face its creative Original, and securing an
instant and joyful compliance with the revelation
thus imparted. The process, throughout, is rational
and ethical ; but spirituality results through the habit-
ual temper of voluntary subjection to Him who is
Truth and reveals it, who is Holy and makes us holy
by making us like Himself. In other words, man be-
comes spiritual through tlie grace of Faith.

176 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

has been less rapid in its advance than the
physical sciences, the reason is that the
processes of psychological attention are
more diflicnlt and exhaustive than the \)to-
cesses of sensuous observation. But he
who deals with the souls of men must
patiently face his own soul, and cannot be
excused from giving continuous attention
to what it has to say on its own behalf.

Xor can there be any real conviction that
there is a God, nuich less an adequate
knowledge of ^^•hat He is, except l)y pro- ^^
found and habitual attention to all the
media through which His eternal Godhead
is disclosed. The conviction is intuitive
only in the sense that it is not foreign to
the mind, intruded upon it from without,
traditional, or the refuge of mental impo-
tence, the necessary choice between two
inconceivables. It is intuitive because it
is inevitable to him who reflects, and be-
cause repeated attention makes it oidy more
irresistible to thought. It is not the pre-
cipitate of ol)servation ; it emerges in ra-
tional reflection. I need hardly remind you
that the elaborate ontological, cosmological,
teleological. and liistorical arguments for
the Divine cxistt'iui' an- no longer regarded

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 177

as invulnerable and conclusive. They as-
sume what they prove ; they do no more
than trace the reflecting process by which
the native and personal conviction justifies
and interprets itself. No man climbs to
the throne of God, by the pathway of the
stars, who does not find the evidence of
His existence and sovereignty first of all, in
himself. I do not mean that there is any
God-consciousness in him, — a barbarous
translation of the German phrase, which
strictly means only a native, rational, im-
mediate conviction of the Divine existence.
Consciousness is only of self ; but a rational
attention to what this consciousness of our
personal, mental, and moral states discloses,
finds its root and synthesis only in the
affirmation of the Divine existence and
supremacy. The rational and the ethical,
as we are 'conscious of them in ourselves,
are uncreated and absolute in their quality ;
we cannot think of them as relative and
limited; and our Avhole conscious life is
thrown into endless and hopeless contra-
diction, unless we postulate the existence
and the sovereignty of Reason and Right
in the uncreated and eternal personal God.
The process is not one of speculation, but

178 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

of definitioii by attention. Attention scat-
ters the mists, and reveals tlie uncreated
glory, the eternal and sovereign reality.
In biblical phrase, God reveals Himself to
man, through faith ; to him whose attention
is voluntary, sincere, and habitual. Here is
our first duty ; to metlitate long and lov-
ingly u})on ourselves and upon Him wliose
image we beai', until God and the soul shall
master us with their realit3^

You are already prepared for a second
suggestion, that if you would be spiritually
minded, you nmst be men of prayer. For
such attention as I have emphasized, is
itself the heart of prayer. TJie Socratic
method is the spiritual method. It bristles
with interrogation points. It is perpetually
asking (piestions, seeking that it may find,
knocking that doors may be opened. For
while adoration, and confession, and thanks-
giving, are inseparable from true prayer,
petition is its heart; and j^etition always
subordinates its request to the Divine will,
the demand softening into the inquiry what
tliat will is, so that we may pray as we
ouglit. There is a lower use of prayer in
which many rest. ThcN' coiiic to (tod oiilv
when they need something, when the guilt

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 179

and shame of sin oppress, when grief
embitters life, when the spirit is over-
whelmed Avith the sense of its weakness.
The Lord is a strong refuge and a high
tower, into which we run when our spears
are broken and our shields trampled into
dust. We think only of ourselves, and
our speech is burdened with the enum-
eration of our wants. But it is far more
important that God should have His way
with us, than that we should have our way
with Him. For God knows us infinitely
better than we know ourselves, and we shall
ask most wisely when we let Him show
us His mind. The twenty-third Psalm
is the sweetest of all religious lyrics, be-
cause of its discovery that God is the
Shepherd of the soul. That not only
secures against want; it drives out the
very thought of want, so that David has
no request to make. The path is always
luminous, the table is always a royal ban-
quet, the way is always secure, and even
the grave is within the enclosure of the
Divine pasturage.

This is the higher use of prayer, in which
we question God about what He is and
what we are, setting our psalm of life to

180 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACmXG.

the key of His self-revelation. He who
does that will ])e jubilant, not sad-toned;
for all God's thoughts are a Gloria in Ex-
celsis. It is the law of true politeness,
when you are a guest, not t(^ talk about
yourself, unless your host leads the way
and pui-sues the inquiry. You win his
favor by admiring his home, his grounds,
his librar}', his pictures, by falling into his
line of thought, and enriching yourself by
his experience. The more renowned and
successful the man whom you meet, the
more anxious you are to let him tell his
story to you. If I could have Paul as my
guest a week, I would not use five minutes
of the time to tell liim wliat I thought, nor
Avould I open Meyer or Godet once during
the interview. I should do nothinsr but
ask questions, and let him do the rest of
the talking. I should be perpetually anx-
ious to know his mind. And to know the
mind of God, what He thinks, desires and
purposes, and what He is, is the highest
function f»f prayer. You do not need to
tell Him what you are, for lie knows more
than yf)U do about that ; let Him tell you
what He is, and liow lie regards you, for
you will never know either, ludess you sit

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 181

silently and attentively at liis feet. And
tills inquiring attitude must be habitual.
It is well to pray morning, noon, and night ;
it is well to pray when you open your
Bible and choose your text; it is well to
pray with pen poised over the blank sheet ;
it is well to pray before you utter the
fii'st word of your message ; but you may
and must do more. Docility must be
ingrained. Reverence must be habitual.
Prayer must be your native air. In the
utmost strain of your intellectual activity
there must be a receptive and inquiring
temper, which makes you eagerly respon-
sive to anything which casts new light
upon the character of Him in whom all
live and move, and l)y whom all must be
judged. So shall it not be you who speak,
but the Spirit of your Father who dwelleth
in you.

No mistake, however, could be more
serious than to imagine that because spir-
ituality is the fixed mental and moral habit
of dealinof with the invisible and eternal
realities of God and the soul, matured
through attention and prayer, it is there-
fore best promoted by contemplative de-
votion. Self-absorption, even when deal-

182 PIIILOSOPIIY OF PREACHING.

ing with the thought of God, has its
dangers. We may easily mistake our
fancies for the suggestions of the Spirit,
as the ignorant and untrained are per-
petually tempted to do. The old slave
population of the South were the professed
recipients of many such revelations ; but
an honored friend of mine, whose early
ministry was spent among them, said that
the men thus honored, confessed, A\'hen
they were questioned, that the Holy Ghost
used the negro dialect, never the speech
of a white man. That pricked the bul)l)le,
and proved the inspiration to Ijc a mental
hallucination. True spirituality is catholic
and cosmopolitan. It moves along that
level of common sense, wliich is a universal
inheritance and possession. It deals with
realities which lie close to all earnest
thought. All souls are alike, and God
does not change. He cannot be to me
what He is to no one else. His impar-
tiality as the Father of all men, forlnds
the notion that He will make me the
special and exclusive organ of a revelation,
which wakes no response in any other
heart, and w liidi good and true men reject
as blasphemmis and silly. So I would

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 183

rather mistrust my own judgment than
break with the general drift of testimony
in the living community of believers.
There is a via media l)etween hitellectual
isolation and an unreasonable su])jection
to traditional judgment. True thought is
like a magnet introduced into a mixture
of iron particles and sands. It sifts by
attracting. The thought which attracts
nothing to itself, proclaims itself thereby
unmagnetized and untrue. What I see
everybody else can see, if they will only
use their eyes, though no one may see it
until I direct his attention to it; but if no
one can see what I claim to see, the natu-
ral inference is tliat there is something
wrong with my eyes, and that it is time
for me to consult an oculist. No one can
see for me ; but the general perception is
more trustworthy than my own. For if
a thing is real, it must at least be real to
every one who is constituted as I am. It
is not otherwise with spirituality or the
perception of invisible realities. These,
too, must be dismissed as illusions, unless
other men yield their prompt assent.
They may have escaped attention, but they
must compel conviction from every honest

184 J'llILOSOJ'IIY OF PREACHING.

and thoughtful man. r[)i)U no other
theory can we cherish the assurance that
Christianity is destined to supi)h\nt every
other religion. It must triumph by its
inherent energy to subdue all rational and
sober thought.

"With this corresponds the New Testa-
ment doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Individ-
uals are the organs of His special revela-
tion, and so become qualified to act as
inspired prophets and apostles, only because
the entire household of faith is under His
instruction and guidance. The apostle does
not stand alone; he is only the organ of
the Clnucli. making clear and articulate
the universal conviction, vague in the
many, definite in him, and through him
becoming definite in all. The Church is
spoken of as the Body and the Bride of
Clu'ist; and union with Christ by the
Spirit is always represented as involving
spiritual fellowship with the Christian com-
munity. The tuition of the Spirit is not
exclusively individualistic ; it is also ge-
neric and social. It is carried on, corrected,
and completed in the household of faith.
It may seem as if the estimates of God,
and of man, which I have so fi'cquently

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 185

emphasized, as the sources of spiritual
power, are the sjDontaneous suggestions of
clear thinking; but they are not. They
have never emerged as vitalizing elements
in pagan philosophy. That God is Father,
and that man is His child, is the peculiar
and authoritative testimony on the nature
and relations of God and man, which is
the priceless heritage of the Christian
Church. You and I have learned the les-
son from her lips, though it depends upon
us whether it shall be merely a traditional
shibboleth, or a vital and vitalizing truth.
It is not true because she has taught it;
she has taught it because it is true ; but
we have come to the knowledge of it
through the Word wliich she has preached,
through the sacraments which she has ad-
ministered, and through the prayers which
we have caught from her lips. So far I,
too, am a Churchman, and di-aw back from
the erratic tendency of an isolated individ-
ualism. I believe in the Hol}^ Catholic
Church, the communion of saints, which
is the household of the Spirit, and to whose
consentient testimony I bow, as embod}dng
a profounder and healthier wisdom than
my own. And in so doing, I learn to dis-

186 PiiiLOSOPiiY OF riiEACiiixa.

tinguish between the shadinv and the siil>
stiince, between a mere mental impression
however vivid, and tlu- living reality, which
is universal and cogent in many minds,
between an illusion and a revelation. Other
men, too, have the Spirit of God, and are
guided by Ilim, and He cannot l)e su2>
posed to produce isolated and contradictory
impressions, so that comparison and elimi-
nation of that which is purely individual,
must help us in the discovery of what the
Spirit's teaching really is. This will secure
for us mental modesty and moral sobriety,
indispensable qualities for the Christian
preacher.

The critical and sifting process must be
carried a step farther. For tlie Church that
now is, is herself the product and the
veliicle of an inherited faitli. In this mat-
ter the third century has no advantage
over the nineteenth. The stream must be
traced to its sources, for in the origin of
the Church we must find llie root of her
past and lier present authority. The docu-
mentary records of our faith, therefore, are,
and nuist ever be, of special significance.
If we must test and correct our subjective
mental impressions by the spiritual testi-

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 187

mony of the Church, we are further bound
to test and correct the latter by the judg-
ment of the Holy Oracles, the Scriptures
of the Old and New Testaments. This
legitimates the Great Reformation of the
sixteenth century, and constitutes the suffi-
cient and unanswerable reply to the charge
of schism, for the separation was made in-
evitable by the movement of return to the
form of Christian doctrine as contained in
the Pauline epistles, to which on any theory,
a higher authority must be conceded than
to any subsequent decrees of councils or
judgments of individual men. No inter-
pretation of Christianity can maintain its
ground which does not fully and fearlessly
challenge comparison with the transmitted
testimony of those wlio founded the Church.
Pure Christianity must be primitive Chris-
tianity, in its ruling conceptions and prin-
ciples, whatever enrichment subsequent
thought may have added, either to creed
or ritual. The oak is not the acorn, but
the germinant seed contains the type and
the law of all succeeding development.
That which is an involuntary and necessi-
tated process in physics, must be secured
by critical comparison in all movements of

188 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

voluntary life. The State perpetually ap-
peals to its fundamental law, to the inten-
tion of its foundei-s, whose political wisdom
it hesitates to call in question, for it may
be assumed that the men who are sum-
moned to meet great and grave emergen-
cies will be guided to discharge their duties
with a sagacity and a courage e(iual to the
task. The stars on the national banner
may be increased fourfold within a cen-
tury, but the flag remains the same, and
the ruling ideas of the constitution con-
tinue to be the controlling forces of the
national development. Christianity ^vith
its wider outlook, conscious of its Divine
origin, and ambitious of universal suprem-
acy, is forced to the most careful and
exhaustive criticism of its documentary
records, which contain the story of the
planting and the training of tlie Church.
The New Testament must be our final
court of appeal, compelling us to reject all
that is subvei-sive of its teaching, and re-
manding to the sphere of pei-sonal liljerty
everything ujion which it does not speak
with ch'ar and decisive autliority.

Primitive Christianity is the only rational
formal basis of Christian union, not the

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. l89

councils of the first six centuries, nor even
the Apostles' Creed, whose doctrine of
Christ's descent into Hades trenches upon
the inferential and doubtful. So long as
this result has not been reached, the debate
between Wittenberg and Rome cannot be
concluded; and within the lines of Prot-
estantism, the severe cross-examination
must continue until the ferment and the
friction of thought shall undermine all
unauthorized claims, eliminate all foreign
elements in doctrine, policy, and ritual,
restoring the simplicity and the vitality of
the apostolic faith. A historic episcopate,
for example, is an illogical compromise,
and an impossible condition to Cliristian
Catholicity. Its antiquity may be ad-
mitted, its beneficent historical influence
may be granted, but it can never be made
binding unless the Acts and the Epistles
disclose its apostolic institution. The
testimony of the Church is not to be lightly
esteemed, and we should be hesitant to
charge its leaders with deliberate deception,
but we are bound to test all its judgments
by the authority of the Scriptures, which
on any theory of their origin, is primary,
and so far plenary and final. If we may

190 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACIIIXG.

not break with the living Church, much
more, and on that very account, may we
not break with our Bil)les. Spirituality
must move" within the sphere of scriptural
testimony. Our mental impressions must
be tested and corrected by the recortls
wliicli contain the primitive revelation.
Our views of what God is, and what man
is, must combine into exact and harmoni-
ous proportions, all tliat is disclosed in
precept and in promise, in judgment and
in blessing, in personal discipline and in
national history. God and the soul are
the great, permanent invisible realities ;
tliey constitute, for us, the moral and eter-
nal universe ; and of these realities, the
Scriptures give us the oldest, the complet-
est, and the most authoritative account.
They constitute a cai-efully prei)ared and
sifted library on these important themes,
which we neglect at our peril in the study
of God and of man ; and spirituality pre-
serves its healthy tone, guarded from the
extravagances of unregulated individual
conceit, only by a careful and habitual
attention to what the Holy Oracles teach.
Tliey nuist be our celestial telescope,

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 191

tlirough which we discover the secrets of
invisible being.

One more step must be taken. For
while the Scriptures are the authentic and
authoritative record of the revelation of
God to man, they are not themselves the
revelation. The Divine disclosure, as the
record plainly shows, passed from lower to
ever hisfher stagfes. It became more defi-
nite, more exalted, more fruitful, more
energetic, until it culminated in the holy
mystery of the Incarnation. Holy men of
old spake as they were moved by the Holy
Ghost ; but in Jesus Ghrist the fulness of
the Godhead dwelleth bodily. It is a long
step from Moses to Isaiah, and a longer
step from Malachi to John. If we had
only Moses, we should have much; but
haviufr Christ, it behooves us to honor Him
as our Master. It is the theology of Clirist
we want. It is the spiritual vision of
Christ, His estimate of God and of man,
which we should strive to attain. And by
that I do not mean the separation of Christ
and of His teaching from all that preceded
His advent, and followed after His ascen-
sion. Cut the heart out of the body, and
both become lifeless. Christ is the heart

192 PIllLOSOPllY OF PREACIIimi.

of the prophetic and apostolic Sciiptuies^
and the criticism which proceeds upon the
principle of excision will have neither a
living Christ, nor a living Bible. The
God-man emerges in the fulness of time,
and lie can be understood only in the
light of his vital environment, as the hope
of all tlu" prophets, and as He to whom all
apostles bear joyful and united testimony.
But He is the sun in the hierarchy of
spiritual teachers. He is the vine in
whom we must have our abiding, if we are
to bear much fruit. His flesh we must
eat, and His blood we must drink. At
His feet we must sit, and His Spirit must
transfigure our own. We must not only
preach Him, but we must preach Avhat He
preached, and as He preached it. It is not
enough to hide behind Him ; He must
shine through us, stirring our hearts, shap-
ing our thoughts, illumining our faces.
Ringing the changes on the sentences and
clauses of the creeds of Chalcedon and of
Constantinople is not preaching Christ.
An orthodox Christology does not consti-
tute you a Christian preacher. Eloquent
and impassioned eulogy of the Cross is not
preaching Christ, and ilini erucifiL'd. He

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 193

must subdue you until your whole rational,
emotional, and volitional life moves alonsr
the level of His own, until His estimates
of God and of the soul become your own,
and secure your glad and habitual subjec-
tion. For He was God and He was man.
He understood both exhaustively, and in
His active and passive obedience the
mighty achievement of human rescue and
redemption was secured. So the world
needs to know not only what He is, and
what He has done, but what He thought
about God and man.

Nay, more, God is what He is, and man
ought to be what He is ; so that every
problem. Divine and human, finds in Him
its solution. He must be our guide in the
interpretation of the Scriptures. For crit-
ical and scientific purposes, it is well to
trace the revelation of God in its historical
development; but for practical purposes,
and in preaching, the order should be re-
versed, and the voice of Jesus Christ be
made to ring in the ears of men. Do not
tarry in the outer court. Do not linger
in the holy place. The veil has been
rent, and you should not stay until your
hands are on the mercy-seat. Make

194 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

Christ's estimates j'our own. Think of
Him as tlie manifested God. His tears at
the grave of Lazarus, and over doomed
Jerusalem, His prayer on the cross for
those who put Him to death, and His
d3'ing charge to John to care for His
broken-hearted mother, are worth more as
a disclosure of what God really is, than all
the labored conceits of the scholastic phi-
losophers. Get your theology from the
parable of the prodigal son. Think of jus-
tice as having tears in it. Make the
Fathcihood of God, as taught by Christ,
and illustrated by His conduct among men,
real to yourself, and your preaching will
have spiritual power. There is anger in
God, but it is always the anger of out-
raged Fatherhood, and that gives to the
Divine anger its moral majesty and power.
And what man is, you can best learn from
Him \\'ho brake l)read with i)ublicans and
sinners, wlio blessed the little children,
who prayed for Peter, that his faith might
not fail, and whose withering cin-se fell
only upon one class of men, tlie hypo-
crites, souls lioneycombed witli falsehood,
in whom moral integrity had been deliber-
ately crushed out. Tlie world needs His

THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 195

Gospel, the Church needs His Spirit more ;
and His Gospel will not conquer the world,
until His Spirit pervades and rules the
Church. Nor will it ever pervade and rule
the Church, so long as it is in any way re-
strained in us, who believe ourselves com-
missioned to preach the Gospel in Christ's
name. You must have Peter's vision, that
nothing which God has made, and upon
which He has set the seal of His ownership
and adoption, is common or unclean. The
man who is not ready to be the servant of
the most degraded has not the spirit of
Christ in him ; and though he may be tol-
erated in the Church, he is unfit to take
the lowest place in the ranks of the
Christian ministry.

Here I must leave you, face to face with
Him, whom, having not seen, you love, in
whom you trust, to whose service you have
pledged your lives, and with whom you
must walk, if you would know the truth,
and secure the baptism of power. I have
taxed your attention long; but the su-
preme importance of the theme must be
my apology and justification.

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT IX
PREACHING.

Among .Vmerifiin })reachers, Charles G.
Finney will always IkiM a (leservedly higli
place. For wliatever may l)u said of liis
theological views, of the criuleness of his
style, and of liis revival methods, tliey
were all the instruments of an intensely
earnest nature, and tliey were wielded with
extraordinary power. It was liis constant
insistence tliat ministers sliould }»reacli witli
a view to immediate results ; and that this
could he done only as the liearer could he
made to see that the theology of the pulpit
was rational, vital, and thorouglily consis-
tent. No man believed in sound doctrine
more than did he, hut his lawyer's instinct
made him feel that a doctrinal system which
])ut a strait-jacket upon liim, and prevented
liini fn >ui securing a promj)t and practical
response, ought to he Hung asicU', and dis-
carded without a moments hesitation. And
196

THE PE ACTIO AL ELEMEXT. 197

therein he was right. ' There is sucli a thing
as dogmatic tyranny, against whicli the
pulpit is summoned to exercise eternal
vigilance. As between the chair of dog-
matic theology and the puli)it, the primacy
belongs to the latter ; and whenever a sys-
tem becomes so liard and unyielding tliat
it withers the sinews of practical appeal, it
has not only outlived its usefulness ; it con-
victs and condemns itself as both illogical
and inadequate. A theology wliich can-
not be preaclied fearlessly and faithfully,
which takes refuge in wire-cbawn distinc-
tions and reservations, Avhich confuses the
speaker and confounds the hearer, cannot
be a true reading either of God or man.
God is not playing hide and seek with us,
and we may not speak to men in His name,
using phrases and defending doctrinal state-
ments which perplex an honest soul.

It may be that Mr. Finney has un-
consciously overdrawn the picture of the
preaching to which he Avas accustomed to
listen in liis early manhood, when men
were urged to repent, and ikew told that
the very ability to repent was tlie gift of
an unconditional decree of Divine elec-
tion ; when thev were sunnnoned to believe

198 PHILOSOPHY OF PR?: ACHING.

in ("liiist, and informed in the next breath
that tliey couhl not believe until they had
been .supernatnially regenerated. The de-
scription, however, is anything but a cari-
cature. Thousands of men have felt the
palsying effect of the system against which
this fiery preacher revolted. The memory
of such preaching comes back to me, with
the terror and agony whicli it awakened,
supposed at the time to be evidences of a
Divine operation, but wliich I have long
since come to regard as diseased mental
and moral states ; and I have good reason
to believe that this style of preaching is
far from having become obsolete. In a
recent correspondence Avith the head of one
of our American tlieological seminaries,
the position was deliberately taken that
all tiiic moral freedom was lost in the fall
of our first })arents, that the only liberty
which survived the apostasy in Eden was
the formal one of choosing between dif-
ferent courses of sin, leaving the soul un-
conditionally dependent upon an act of
Divine power before it was invested with
the ability to repent and believe. It is
possible for a man to hold such a specula-
tive system, and then preach with an utter

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 199

disregard to it, on the principle that as the
Divine decree is secret and unsearchable,
every man must be addressed a3 if no such
decree existed ; but in such a case it might
be as well to eliminate the doctrine of de-
crees altogether. The longer you preach,
the pro founder will become your convic-
tion that men can be quickened into spirit-
ual life only by the power of the Holy
Ghost ; and you will discover, pari passu.,
that you cannot gra})ple with men unless
you charge u})on tliem the full and exclu-
sive responsibility for their moral state.
These are the two poles of thought between
which all theology swings, with the con-
stant temptation to eliminate either the
one or the other in the interest of scien-
tific unity. The worse heresy, however, of
the two, in nw deliberate judgment, is that
which fails to emphasize the reality of
man's moral freedom ; which, for example,
appears to invest him Avitli it in recogniz-
ing his natural ability, and then reduces it
to zero by the doctrine of moral impotence.
But whether you agree with me in this
attitude or not, the point -ef urgency is
this, that your theology must be the out-
come of your preaching, not its antecedent,

200 PHILOSOrilY OF PREACHING.

superimposed condition and limitation. It
must be forged anew, link by link, in your
earnest grapple with men. The Word of
God is a hammer, a coal of fire, a two-
edcfed sword. A hammer breaks ; fire
burns ; the sword pierces ; and you must
have a theology which does all that. Do
not underetand me as undervaluing thor-
ough and systematic theological training.
The years which you are sj)ending in these
quiet halls, and under the instruction of
tried and trained teachers, are years which
you should improve to the utmost. They
will familiarize you with the great systems
of thought, which have been patiently
wrought out amid the stress and strain of
fierce controversy ; and there is nothing so
conducive to mental sobriety and balance
as the careful stud}' of historical theology.
The sublime unity of the Christian faith
will command growing and grateful recog-
nition amid the widest diversity of state-
ment. The discovery will give you anchor-
age for all the years to come ; it will
prevent you from mistaking eccentricity
for originality, and will guard you from
that "waste of intellectual energy, which
ignorantly spends its strength in rchabili-

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 201

tating old and exploded dogmas. But
this conservative temper, provoked and
fostered by historical study, will also make
you more genuinely and profoundly cath-
olic. It will make you impatient of
theological partisanship. Robertson, of
Brighton, made frequent use of the prin-
ciple, which he borrowed from the Hege-
lian philosophy, that all true thought
proceeds from thesis and antithesis, to
synthesis, from affirmation and denial, to
a more comprehensive formula. It is Atha-
nasius against Arius, Augustine against
Pelagius, Anselm against Grotius and Soci-
nus, Luther against Zwingle, Calvin against
Wesley ; and the heretics manage in time
to tone down the extreme positions of their
antagonists. The living thought of our
time refuses to be confined in the vocabu-
lary of any preceding theological school ;
and what we have been pleased to call
consistent Calvinism, or improvements upon
the Genevan theology, is only a euphemism
covering the practical abandonment of cer-
tain positions once deliberately taken and
stoutly defended. In this matter Prince-
ton has been as great a sinner as New
Haven ; and Charles Hodge was as much

202 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

an innovator as Nathaniel W. Taylor;
while the younger Hodge found it neces-
sary at almost every step to say that he
(lid not quite agree with liis father, or that
he preferred a slightly different statement.
Calvinism has been Arminianized, and Ar-
minianism has become Calvinized; and the
patient reading of Wigger's monograph
on Augustinianism has convinced many of
us that Pelagius was not so great a heretic
y^s we once imagined. There is something
to me very suggestive in the fact that of
all the fathers, as we call them, the most
modern is Chrysostom, whi> was a great
theologian only as he was a great preacher,
working out his theology under the pres-
sure of tremendous practical emergenc}'.
No system of theology can be absorbed,
which must not be again broken to pieces,
and passed through the fiery crucible of
personal meditation, shaping itself into logi-
cal forms and phrases of your own, before
you can ilnd the truest freedom in preach-
ing. You must wear yoiu' own coat, fitted
to your own person; and yon nnist have
your own theology.

The conservatism and the catholicity of
wliicli I have spoken, should be at once

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 203

an encouragement to independence and a
salutary restraint upon it. The substance
of your message can never be of your in-
vention. But the treasure has come to
you in earthen vessels, and even the lan-
guage of the Bible may be followed in the
spirit of mechanical bondage. It is the
prophetic and apostolic thought which you
must seize, and then reproduce it in your
own vernacular. For language is every-
where mobile. It is in perpetual flux. It
bears the impress of time. The dictionary
is not .always an infallible court of appeal.
Classical usage may mislead you. And if
this is true, even of the Scriptures, much
more is it true of the long line of the great
teachers of the Church, who have given
their best powers to the exposition of the
Gospel. Every one of them shows the in-
fluence of his training, of his mental and
moral peculiarities, of the philosophy which
dominated him, and of the logical meth-
ods current in his time.

In no department of language is this
element of change more patent than in
the use made of illustrations. At one
time they are imperial, as in tlie psalms
and the prophets ; at another time they are

204 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

legal, as in the epistles of Paul and in
the Augustinian theology ; at another time
they are conimercial or governmental, as
in more recent years. Thus on the basis
of Paul's comparison between Adam and
Christ, introduced by way of illustration,
tlie wliole doctrine of sin and of redemp-
tion has been constructed, with the notion
of imputation rigorously carried through
every part. So, again, the idea of a cov-
enant, as embodying the peculiar feature
of Jewish national life, has been carried
back into Eden, and into the counsels of
eternity, resolving all moral history into
the execution and fuHilment of a con-
tract. Illustrations are impressive and
useful, so long as they are used by way of
suggestion ; but they are mischievous when
they are charged with the office of logical
construction ; and a very large part of the
preacher's intellectual task consists in seiz-
ing the vital truth, whieh hides behind all
analogies, and wliich must not be allowed
to l^ecome imprisoned in any, using them
all, dis[)ensing with them all, and creating
more fitting ones, as the case may require.
In all this, one thing requires emphasis,
— you nuist be theologians. You niust

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 205

have A clear-cut, definite, symmetrical body
of religious convictions, supported by a
close and patient study of the Bible. You
will be despised if your mental equipment
consists of rags ; you will be laughed at
if it is made up of an incongruous assort-
ment of patches. Your doctrinal system
may be very meagre, and it may be
very comprehensive and exhaustive ; but
whether the one or the other, it must be
homogeneous and consistent, bearing in
its every part the impress of your per-
sonal elaboration, as the famous shield of
classic story is said to have been so forged
that were it broken into a thousand frag-
ments, every one of them would have pro-
claimed the name of its maker. You can
make no greater mistake than to abandon
the study of systematic theology upon
your graduation. In science, in art, you
may be content that your hearers shall be
greatly your superiors ; but in yonv mi-
nute and systematic knowledge of the
Biljle, the occupancy of a pulpit compels
you to seek for such mastery that your
aptness to teach will be recognized by all.
Now and then I meet a man who says,
" Well, since I left the seminary I have

206 I'lllLOSOPllY OF PREACIIIXG.

dismissed tlieology, and luive been content
to read the New Testament." But an
hour's talk lias convinced me that the Xew
Testament had fallen into the same neg-
lect, that the reading had become scrappy
and superficial, that thought had become
hazy, uncertain, and confusing, and that
the preaching had lost its manly vigor.
No man can read the psalms, the propliets,
the epistles, without girding liis intel-
lectual loins, and without being forced to
search for and seize the ruling ideas by
which all the separate uttei-ances are
shaped and co-ordinated. Nothing is of
greater practical importance tlian this per-
sonal, independent mastery of the vital
theology which is contained in the Holy
Oracles. In the prosecution of tliis en-
deavor, the best books will soon come
under your notice, and lind their way upon
your library shelves, critical, exegetical,
historical, and theological. Nor will you
be able to conduct these inquiries with-
out constant reference to psychology and
ethics; for it is still true that no difficulty
emei'Cfes in theologfy wliicli is not also a
problem in ]iliilosopliy. and in which ctlii-
cal concejilions do not play a most im})or-

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 207

tant part. Nor can you afford to ignore
political economy, in either of its two
great departments, civil and economic sci-
ence. For not only are these integral parts
of the Mosaic code ; but the record of
Scripture is largely a revelation of God in
His treatment of nations, and a disclos-
ure of the forces by which national pros-
perity, de<3adence, and ruin have been
determined. The science of government
is a moral science, because it deals with
man, and no governmental statutes may
trench upon the moral dignity of the hu-
man subject. Nor can economic science,
in its discussions, ignore the moral factor,
discoursing of capital and labor, of pro-
duction and distribution, in terms of im-
personal speech ; for it is the man, who is
capitalist or laborer, producer or con-
sumer; and economic regulations and cus-
toms must not be permitted to crush or
deface the manhood of the lowliest.

In the controversy on electrical light-
ing, the courts of New York decided that
corporate rights were limited by public
safety ; and that whenever it became clear
that human life was endangered by any
corporation, the latter became a pnblic nui-

208 rniLOsopiiY of preaciiixo.

sance, which any man had a right to abate.
Man is the only sacred tiling on the globe,
Avhose natural rights may ni^t be ignored,
who may neither be enslaved nor imbruted.
We may do what we will, with all that
grows in the soil, or is found in the for-
ests, or is hidden in the earth, or flies in
the air, or swims in the sea ; but he who
sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his
blood be shed. It is the fearful lesson of
universal history, that there is something
in man which resents the touch of oppres-
sion, so that tyranny always builds its
throne upon an eartlupiake. There is no
l)east so ferocious, no serpent so venomous,
that 3'ou cannot exterminate them or drive
them into harmless seclusion ; l)ut these
arts cannot safely be plied with men. The
memory of wrong abides ; the power of
retaliation slowly gathers ; the whisper be-
comes a wail ; the wail mounts into a ciy
of rage ; and the rage bursts into blind and
ruthless vengeance.

Let us not (U'ccivc ourselves. Tlie
forces which dcsti-oycd I'^^gypt and Baby-
lon, which hastened the fall of Rome, and
whicli lieaved in the l-'rcncli Revolution,
slumber in evcrv human brrasl, williin

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 209

which rankles the sense of wrong. Wliat
the white man will not tolerate, the black
man will not forever endure ; what the
rich man resents, the poor man will not
quietly suffer ; and however proud we may
be of our Anglican and American civil-
ization, w^e must not forget that disdain of
man, and injustice to him, develop a storm
centre before whose fury nothing can
stand. This is the practical side of relig-
ion, to love your neighbor as yourself, not
to carry him, but to give him all the elbow
room which you demand for yourself ; and
this is not a sentimental duty, a grace of
refined life, an ethical superfluity, but the
sternest of all political and industrial im-
peratives, apart from which there can be
no permanent security to person or prop-
erty. To this bold defence of universal
manhood, your vocation consecrates you.,
That must be your message to those who
bear rule in the state, and who control the
industries of the country, taking care
meanwhile not to meddle with questions
of method and of application, for which
your hearers are presumed to be better
qualified than you possibly can be. For
the Christian preacher should never permit

210 PIIILOSOl'llY OF PREACHING.

luin.self to sink to the level of a mere
social and industrial reformer. He will do
his best work if he resolutely refrains from
becoming a partisan, from identifying him-
self with methocLs and measures which
come within the realm of expedienc}', and
the endorsement or criticism of which does
not involve the application of universal
ethical principles. \o\\ are to keep your
eye fixed upon the man, made in tlie image
of God, and therefore inviolable ; not upon
his environment, which is incidental and
subordinate, and which in a perfect society
would remain as varied as are the capac-
ities and endowments, the industry and
energy, of the individuals who constitute
the social organism. I do not say that
occasions may not arise when you must
range yourselves on one side of a great
popular contest or on the other, when to
be silent would be cowardice and Ijctrayal
of your trust; for the pulpit should be
God's mouthpiece against tyranny and op-
pression, whether ecclesiastical or civil or
social or industrial. Of tliis you must
be the judges; but you ought to be per-
fectly sure that an intelligent zeal for
God and man is tlic lire wliiili 1)urns in

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 211

your bones, and wliicli unseals your lips,
and that it is not a feverish excitement pro-
duced by the heated and unwholesome
atmosphere of the time.

You will conclude, from what I have
said, that a pretty broad field of intel-
lectual activity awaits your entrance, in
Avhich your powers will be taxed to the
utmost, and incessantly. That is just the
conviction which I wish to impress upon
you. The preacher's mission is no sin-
ecure. It is not an elegant leisure to
which you are summoned, where you may
indulge your scholarly tastes, and become
the centre of a select and refined circle.
You are to be fishers of men, and the
most costly tackle in the market is Avorth-
less if the trout do not leap when 3^ou cast
the fly. The Gospel of Christ is needed
wherever jow go, and you must so preach
it as to set men to thinking about the mes-
sage which you have brought to them.
Alas for you if they only j^raise the ser-
mon, or the grace of your polished utter-
ance; you must plant barbed arrows in
their hearts, which shall leave behind them
the pain of a godly sorrow. God and
Christ, sin and salvation, redemption and

212 PHiLosoriiY OF rnEArmxG.

judgnieiit, luust be made intensely reiil to
them ; and you can make real to others
only what is vivid to yourself. So I say
again, and -would repeat it a thousand
times : Be theologians. Let your theol-
ogy be practical, never swinging in air,
but let there be theology. You must
have something to say, and the thing
which you say must be an expression
of the thought of God, and of the mind
of Christ; which again amounts to this,
that the Christian preacher must be a
Christian theologian.

"When, twenty-five years ago, I was
graduated from the theological seminary,
and ordained as pastor over a quiet sub-
urban church on the banks of the Hudson
River, I determined that my first work
should be a close and patient study of the
Person of Christ. I felt that I must know
who ni}- master was. Tlic lirst book I
purchased was Dorncr's History of the
Person of Christ, which still remains the
best monograph on the subject. For more
than two years I plodded along, reading
right and left, as my time and resources
would periiit, in systematic and historical
theology, witli close and constant refer-

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 213

ence to the Gospels and Epistles as writ-
ten in their chronological order. I have
never regretted the choice I made, nor the
stndies with which I followed it, when I
made Miiller's monograph on the doctrine
of sin the subject of an equally close
reading. I doubt whether a theological
graduate can do better now, than to be-
gin his pastoral studies with Christology.
Until that is mastered, I would shelve
eschatology. For in my deliberate judg-
ment, the constitution of our Lord's Person
is the one thing on which the most defi-
nite instruction is needed, and with regard
to Avhich there is a subtle and insicUous
tendency in modern thought to depart
from the New Testament representation.
The evangelical, and even the ecclesias-
tical phrases are retained ; but they are
emptied of their meaning. The Incarna-
tion is interpreted in the light of man's
creation in the image of God. God and
man are regarded as homogeneous in
nature, as mutually inclusive, and not
exclusive. This philosophical postulate is
Scriptural, and is of immense advantage ;
l)ut it has paved the way for a new series
of Christolocfical errors. The man Christ

211 riiiLosoPiiY OF riiEAciiixij.

Jesus, the bearer of a sinless and perfect,
an ideal and archetypal humanity, lias
come by many to be regarded as ij>so facto,
the manifested God ; and his tleity has
been reduced to a uni(pie divinity. It is
a new form of Unitarianism, retaining the
language wliich Christian usage lias con-
secrated. According to this view God was
indeed in Christ, but only as He is poten-
tially in every man, as He is consciously
and energetically in every hoi}- man, as he
must be in plenary i)Ower in the lioliest of
men, in the man wliose moral altitude is
the loftiest.

Such an interpretation might possibly
cover the description in the Synoptic Gos-
pels, and even the statements in the Pauline
Epistles ; but it will not lit the facts whieli
emerge in the Gospel of John, which
embodies the ripest fruit of the matured
apostolic reminiscence and reflection. For
in this Gospel our Lord is represented as
having affirmed His conscious existence
in Abraham's day, as having claimed the
riglit to ('(pial honor with the Fatlier, and
as ha\ing prayi'd that He might Ix- inves-
ted witii the ghuy A\hiih He ha<l witli the
Father befoie the Wdrld was. The siidess

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 215

man could not have said these things, if
they Avere not true ; and they disclose to
us the deepest ground of His disciplined
and matured personal consciousness. There
is a great and impassable gulf here be-
tween Him and all other men. Tlie period
before birth is to us all an absolute blank ;
and the first years of our infancy are
shrouded in the same impenetrable gloom.
No philosopher, no saint, has been able to
pierce to the beginnings of mortal life.
What must the j^ersonal consciousness be
which leaps back to Abraham's time, and
to the period antedating creation ? Out
of that reminiscence grew in John's mind
the doctrine of the Logos, in the prologue
to his Gospel ; which doctrine is thus seen
to be not a speculative notion, borrowed
from Alexandria, but a strictly inductive
conclusion from the facts which our Lord's
utterances disclosed. It may not be pos-
sible to define the exact nature of the
indwelling Deity in tlie man Jesus Cluist ;
but it certainly was altogether unique,
constituting Him the only begotten Son
of God ; and the spiritual indwelling of
God in believers cannot be accepted as an
analogue, for the simple reason that there

216 niiLOsoruY of rnKArnixo.

"were elements in C'hiists niiituied personal
conseioiLsness, whieli are wanting, even in
the most rudimentary forms, in the con-
scious life of humanity.

On the natui-e of the indwelling of God
in Christ, the Church has never been able
to pronounce judgment, and it probably
•will never be able to do so. It has con-
tented itself with negative deliverances.
It has rejected Nestorianism, Ijecause that
kept the (iod and the man too far apart;
it rejected Eutychianism, because tliat
brought them too close together, making
of them an incongruous mixture ; it rejec-
ted Apollinarianism, because that truncated
the man; and it has rejected every notion
which suggested a dormant, or paralyzed,
or quiescent God, or Avhich regarded Him
as having reduced Himself to the dimen-
sions of a human soul. It has insisted
upon leaving intact the man Christ Jesus ;
but it has also claimed that Avhat He said
about Himself disclosed a uni(pie indwell-
ing of essential Godhood, whose reality
cannot be gainsaid without impeaching
either his veracity or his mental sanity.
And it is equally plain that the unique
and mysterious personal constitution of

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 217

our Lord gives a peculiar authority to his
teachings, a singuLir force to his precepts
and promises, a unique function to his
death, resurrection, ascension, and inter-
cession. My apology for this doctrinal
digression must be the important part which
this theme has had in my own early stuches,
and the central place which it holds in the
theology of the present. The most jDracti-
cal thing any of you can do is to make
your footing in Christology firm and secure,
so that you can preach the Living Christ
as the wisdom and the power of God unto
salvation.

Of hardly less practical importance is
the rule that the preacher should always
aim to make himself perfectly understood
by all who listen to him. By this I do not
mean that his thought and utterance must
be on a level with the youngest and the
least matured in his auchence. A certain
degree of mental and moral activity is re-
quired in the hearer ; and this preliminary
discii^line belongs more properly to the
household, than to the preacher in the con-
duct of public worship and in the discharge
of his office as a Christian teacher. The
pulpit must address itself to men and

218 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

women, and to all whose years have brought
tliem to lialnts of reflection, and to the
period of clear-cut conscious personal re-
sponsibility ; while parents must be urged
to be priests in their own homes, rearing
their childi-en in the nurture and admoni-
tion of the Lord. The pulpit must be mas-
culine, not infantile. Even the childi-en
will be attracted by its manliness. For
they soon become impatient of any mode
of address, or tone of utterance, which sug-
gests condescension on the part of the
speaker ; and T apprehend that we do not
give them full credit for the intellectual
and moral activity of which they are com-
petent. Almost before you know it, your
boys and girls, if you have cultivated their
acquaintance and secured their friendship
in a manly way, will become your most
attentive listeners and your keenest critics.
I have frequently been surprised at the
way in which lads twelve and fourteen
years of age, and young misses no older,
have spoken to me of the help given them
by discourses which T had supposed to be
beyoiul their comprehension, in the prep-
aration and delivery of which I had simply
endeavored to use the language of the peo-

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 219

pie ; and my own ministry lias convinced
me that children are keener listeners than
we suspect.

A much more serious and prevalent ob-
stacle to the preacher's success, than the
immatuiity of his hearers, is the distraction
of their thought, their volatile and incon-
stant temper. They are active about too
many things, and the will is not summoned
to exert its power of restraint. There is a
lack of attention, and that can never be
remedied by anything but the manliest ad-
di'ess, where weighty thought is comnui-
nicated in clear, dignified, and forcible
speech. Do not put on the air of a phi-
losopher. Do not speak in the language of
a professional theologian. On the other
hand, do not become a clown nor pose as a
wit, nor run into story telling, nor fall into
the slang of the street. The true speech
of the pulpit is plain, direct, unconven-
tional, conversational, with a quiet, manly
dignity befitting the occasion and the
theme.

I have spoken of the imperative neces-
sity of recasting the results of 3'our profes-
sional studies into logical and verl)al forms
of your own. The process needs to be car-

220 PHILOSOniY OF rREACIlING.

lied a step farther, to tlie translation of
your own theological conceptions into the
vocabulary of the people. It is reported of
one of the Alexanders that he once su^)-
plied the place of a theological student in
a rural pulpit near Princeton, where no
one kneAV him, and that one of the eldei"S
wrote back to the seminary, that while the
old man was not as ilne a preacher as their
regular supply, he was a '• mighty good
talker," had interested the people very
much, and that everyl)ody would be glad
to hear him again. A good talker is the
most effective preacher. He will wear the
longest and command the highest regard.
Sound, sensible talk, when it is dashed with
Avholesome passion, and vital with intense
earnestness, will break out into the most
genuine eloquence and pathos.

I am afraid that we have studird models
of eloquence too much. There is a won-
derful similarity between the great and
effective preachers of any single period.
Tlicrc is an r(|nally marked difference be-
tween the great and effective preachers of
any given period, and those wlio })receded
or followed tliiiii. Tlicrc is often the
jrreatest contrast bclwem the earhand the

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 221

later style of the same man, as may be no-
ticed in tlie case of Charles H. Spiirgeon.
The change is partly clue to personal de-
velopment, bnt mainly to an increasingly
closer identification with j^opular habits of
speech. Language, too, is an elastic in-
strument ; it is in a state of constant flux ;
and the speech of the pulpit, where it is
most vigorous and effective, always betrays
the current forms of earnest and thoughtful
address. As in the pronunciation and defi-
nition of words we frequently pass from
the dictionaries to ordinary usage, so must
language be studied and mastered as a liv-
ing organism, not as an embalmed or pet-
rified relic of the past. Macaulay, and
Robert Hall, and Foster, may be read to
great advantage, but so may the periodicals
and the newspapers of the present day.
The current speech may not be as classical
and polished as your scholarly tastes might
wish it were, but you must take it as you
find it, avoid its coarseness, and make the
best use of it possible. You may not ig-
nore it, any more than you would ignore
the coat, vest, and pantaloons, which society
has adopted as a man's regulation dress.
You may think knee-breeches, and a scarlet

222 rillLOSOPJIT of PREACniNG.

waistcoat, and silver shoe-buckles, and \)ov:-
dered hair, and lace ruffles, much more i)ic-
tures<jue and becoming, but you would
hardly appear in such an outfit in the pul-
pit. Style is the dress of thought. It must
conform to popular usage. It must not be
antique and antiquated, l)ut modern and
pi'actical. Instruction in rhetoric and logic
is not confined to a few classical models ; it
must be sought, with equal diligence, in
the language which the great majority uses.
And tliis common speeeli will be found
not to be lacking in dignity and force. It
is a noble instrument, by the use of \\hi(li
society conducts its intellectual exchange,
and whose simple nervous energy the best
literature appropriates and preserves. Talk
in the pulpit as earnest men talk to each
other, and as they talk to you. That will
be almost sure to lead you to cultivate
wliat is called extcmi)orane()Us preaching,
— whicli is neitlicr nicmoiiter recitation,
nor loose, unconnected, luipremeditated
speech, — but the free utterance of clear
and thoroughly mastered thought. You
ought to be able to read a 1)ook. and then,
witliout a memorandnin 1o liclj) you, to
give an intelligent and coniu'ctcd slate-

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 223

ment of its argument and conclusions, just
a-^ the best recitation in the class-room is
the free reproduction of the assigned les-
son. I remember reciting page after page
of Butler's Analogy without any conscious-
ness of verbal bondage, having been solely
intent upon grasping the thought in all its
windings and iii its logical termination.
And you ought to be able to write a care-
ful and connected synopsis of a sermon,
amounting almost to a fully written dis-
course, and then reproduce it in the speech
which the thought will spontaneously sug-
gest. The secret consists in the mastery
of the matter, and in the clearness of the
logical analysis. It involves the abandon-
ment of an ambition to say fine or eloquent
things, and to make your discourses bril-
liant with literary adornment ; though the
truest eloquence will come often when you
are least laboring for it, when your thought
is at white heat, and when phrases will leap
to your lips which half an hour afterwards
you may not be able to reproduce. The
secret of forcible extemporaneous speech is
in having something weight}' to say, and in
the determination to make yourself clearly
understood. Whether you use the pen or

224 PHILOSOPHY OF PRE ACHING.

not, in the work of preparation, is a matter
of subordinate importance, though the rule
will be a pretty free and careful use of the
pen, without a slavish Ijondage to the lines
which are traced upon the })aper.

I do not object to written sermons. I
do not object to their being read. There
are occasions when every man resorts to
that method, and for some men it may be
ordinarily the best. But I do not believe
that the extemporaneous preacher should
be regarded as the exceptional man ; nor
that free speech in delivering the message
of God to men is the idi-al form, in the
sense of its being the prei-ogative of the
elect few. That assum[)ti(>n nips a whole-
some ambition in tlie bud, and will
make a young man who conscientiously
attempts it feel, in spite of himself, that
he is regarded *as vain and conceited.
The extemporaneous method is the ideal
method, only because it is the normal
method. It is not the easiest. It is, of
idl iiiftliods, the most exacting and per-
ilous. It exposes to the greatest ex-
tremes, and makes havoc of any attempt
to maintain a fair average. l)Ut its very
(liHii-iiltirs constitute its practical powci'.

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 225

It keys the preacher to the utmost physical,
mental, and moral tension. It brings out
all the man there is in him; while the
erectness of his posture, the kindling of
his eye, the naturalness of his tone, them-
selves constitute an instrument of convic-
tion. It is worth all it costs ; and there
are few men who, by diligent and faithful
endeavor through a series of years, cannot
become acceptable and forcible masters of
extemporaneous speech, while many men
part with half of their power through an
early and long-continued surrender to the
written manuscript. You may not puljiish
as many volumes of sermons if you pursue
this method, for a sermon uttered in free,
conversational speech hardly ever reads
well J but then sermons are not read much
anyhow, and when you remember how
widely and eagerly Robertson's sketches
have been read, not one of which was
written before he preached it, you will
conclude that a sermon lives not because
it was carefully written, but because it was
preached at white heat. There is no
special need, that I know of, wh}- there
slioidd be an increase of sermonic literature,
and an average of one printed sermon in

226 PHILOSOPHY of preaching.

twenty years for every minister in the
United States -would add annually live
LundnMl volumes to our li])raries ; so that,
on till' wliole, we might as woU be content
to let the ordinary sermon do its work at
the moment of its utterance. Strike that
one blow ^vith all the power that you can
muster.

But it is not enough for you to preach
in such a way that men cannot fail to
undei'stand you. You must connnand not
only their attention, but their approval.
By this I do not mean that you are to be
anxious of popular applause. Behind many
a cheer there is a covert sneer, and at the
heart of many a curse there is invohuitary
homage. Popularity is neither to Ije
souoht nor to be avoided; but the assent
of the moral judgment should be every
preacher's earnest and constant aim — com-
mending himself to ever}- man's conscience
in the sight of God. The Gospel whieh
you are commissioned to preach is for
every man and lor all men. It igm)res all
differences of rank, and distinctions of
race, in its urgent ai>i)eals to repentance,
in its ethical instructions, and in its gracious
promises. It is no respecter of persons.

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 227

That does not mean that it looks with
equal contempt upon everybody, but with
equal and genuine regard. It maintains
inviolate the prerogatives and privileges,
the duties and the dignities, of each and
all. It speaks a universal language, touch-
ing upon matters which come home to all
with equal force. The preacher should
never permit himself to sj)eak in such a
way as to divide his audience into parties,
whose concurrent moral judgment he is
unable to command.

This rules out the discussion of all topics,
however vital and important in their vway,
on which equally honest men may earnestly
disagree. Never meddle with party poli-
tics in the pulpit. It is the devil's snare.
The ethical principles involved in the con-
stitution and the administration of gfovern-
ment, and in the discharge of the duties of
citizenship, are legitimate themes for dis-
cussion by the preacher; but the applica-
tion of these principles to specific cases
must be left to every man's independent
and intelligent decision. If you advise
him from the pulpit, you are assuming the
role of a political boss, and the resentment
will be natural and risfhteous. And even

228 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

in the inculcation of the ethical principles
of political economy, it is the part of
wisdom to make them prominent when
the i)opu]ar pulse is not feverish. Election
sermons accomplish little good, however
cautious the argument, and however rmob-
jectionable the matter, because your hearers
will be perpetually wondering what ticket
you are trying to help. Don't preach on
temperance on the Sunday before the polls
open, when the prohibition candidates are
canvassing for votes. You may injure a good
cause by advocating it at an inopportune
time ; and even if you are a pronounced
political prohibitionist on conscientious
moral grounds, many of yom- hearers are
not, and they have as good a riglit to
judge for themselves in matters of j^ractical
legislation as you have. Take the stump,
if you want to, though I think you had
better not; but at all events, let your
pulpit voice only the autliority of Jesus
Christ. A prominent New York pastor
told me recently that the most effective
sermon which lie ever preached on Christian
giving fell upon a Sunday, when the bas-
kets were not passed, and the people knew
that they would not be. lie did it delib-

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 229

erately, and the result amazed him. When
the next collection was taken, everybody
was eager to give, and the contributions
doubled. They stayed there, too. The
effect was permanent. There is in this a
practical hint of the greatest importance,
that the minister's best work is always
done when no one can suspect that he is
posing as a special pleader.

Few things are of greater practical im-
portance, than securing, and keeping, the
confidence of your hearers in your per-
sonal integrity, and in your enthusiastic
devotion to your work. Respect for the
cloth is rapidly disapj)earing. You must
be a man among men. Do not whine.
Do not fish for comj)liments. Do not go
about with hat in hand as if you were a
beggar. Live within your income, and if
it is not paid promptly, appeal to the man-
liness of your church or parish officers.
Be a straightforward Imsiness man in busi-
ness matters. JNIake both ends meet. You
can do it as easily as the men to whom you
preach, the majority of whom do not handle
as much money as you do. Pay your debts
promptly, and do not suffer them to accu-
mulate until your people become ashamed

230 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING.

of you and cancel them for you. Such
favors will destroy your self-respect, and
make you the object of silent but severe
contempt. Wherever you are, do yoiu-
best. Do not permit yourself to regard
your parish as only a temporary abode, a
stepping-stone to something more desira-
ble and more worthy of you. The men
who do that, as I could easily prove to
you by reference to living examples, are
the bitterly disappointed men, who end
their days in neglected sadness. He*who
seeks his life is sure to lose it. Self-for-
getfulness must be your habitual temper.
You may see inferior men preferred to you.
Honors may come to them, while you are
ignored. If so, do not complain. Do not
become morose. Do not permit yourself
to cherish the idea that you are slighted,
or the victim of a eons[)iracy. Do your
own work all the more heartily, (rive it
all your time and strength. Your cliurch
has a right to them, and you will make a
most stuix'udons blnnder if you imagine
that, by dispersing your activity, you can
increase your influence.

Be a king at home, and surrender the
domestic reins to no other hands. Be

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 231

chary of pulpit exchanges. Preach in your
own pulpit, and let your o^yn people see
that you do this on principle, and by de-
liberate preference. And whenever you
preach, always do your best. Do not
hoard your resources, doling them out by
weight and measure, holding back more
than you give, from fear that no new sup-
plies can be gathered. Empty the cup-
board. The healthiest state you can be
in on Sunday night is that of complete
exhaustion, not physical, but intellectual ;
the feeling that you have pumped your-
self dry. That will compel you to fresh
and deeper study. That will foster the
temper of mental vigilance ; and that will
make you grow. And your people will be
quick to discern the generosity and unself-
ishness of your disposition. Devotion will
provoke devotion. Confident of your in-
tegrity and fidelity, tliey will make all due
allowances for you. They will not expect
you to strike twelve every time you preach ;
and you will be surprised to find how much
of good they discern in your most stum-
bling speech. Give yourself wliolly to them,
and put your whole soul into every service,
and you will not fail to fasten them to you

232 riiiLosopiiY of pneaching.

as by bands of tempered steel. Thej' will
not grow weary of you Avlien you grow
old. The dead line in the ministry, as in
any other calling, is the line of laziness.
The lawyer cannot use last year's briefs.
The physician cannot depend on last week's
diagnosis. The merchant cannot assume
that a customer of ten yeai-s' standing will
not be enticed elscAvhere. And the preacher
must be a live, wide-awake, growing man.
Let liim dye his brains, not liis hair. Let
his thought be fresh, and his speech be
glowing. Sermons, it lias well been said,
are like bread, wliich is delicious when it
is fresh ; but whicli, Avhen a month ohl, is
hard to cut, liarder to eat, and liardest of
all to digest. Be resolute in tliis matter.
Some of your friends may urge you to take
things more easily. Tliere is danger in
overwork; but laziness is more generally
the ministerial besetting danger and sin ;
and as soon as a man yields to that, he
will lind the })eoplc becoming listless, and
one by one dropping out of their pews. It
is your business to keep them fidl, so far
as Christian earnestness and lidclily, on
your part, can do it.

I have but one moi'c suggestion to make.

THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 233

and that is this : Xever fail to make your
hearers feel their plenary personal respon-
sibility. Every utterance of the pulpit
must urge, either exj)licitly or implicitly,
to moral decision and action. The hearei-s
must be made to see that there is something
for them to do, and that it must be done
at once, that the moral obligation may be
neither evaded nor j^ostponed. However
broad the range of your preaching, it must
always grapple with the individual con-
science, and summon the soul to bow to
the moral judgment which it passes upon
itself. This is bringing men face to face
with God in Jesus Christ ; and such preach-
ing cannot fail to be in power, and in the
demonstration of the Holy Ghost.

]My task is done. I have spoken plainly
and strongly, but not unad\dsedly. I have
brought you the sifted wheat of a quarter
of a century of ministerial experience ; and
I leave you to separate from it the chaff
that may be mixed w^ith it. I have put
my profoundest personal convictions into
these lectures, under the feelinor that in
this way I could serve you best in the dis-
charge of my duty. I thank you for your
patient attention. It has been a pleasure

234 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHIXG.

for me to meet you. I shall always be
glad to give you the grasp of a brother's
hand ; and I shall not cease to pray for you,
that your ministry may be abundantly
fruitful, bringing glory to our Lord, cheer
and strength to 3'our fellow-men, and a
deepening joy to yoiu- own hearts. Let
me close with the great apostle's earnest
charge to Timothy :

'•''Be thou an example of the believers, in
word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit,
in faith, in jjiiriti/. Give attendance to
readinif, to exhortation, to doctrine. Neylect
not the ijift that is in thee, ivhich was given
thee hy ^^rojt>/feci/, ivith the layiny on of the
hands of the presbytery. Meditate \ipon
these things ; give thyself tvholly to them,
that thy profiting may appear to all. Tahe
heed unto thyself, and \into the doctrine ;
continue in them ; for in doing this thou
shalt both save thyself a)td theni that hear
thee:'

Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston, Mass.

Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, Mass.

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